Blue Jasmine: Superb study in self-delusion

Blue Jasmine (2013) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for dramatic intensity, mature thematic material and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.9.13

From the first scene, we can’t take our eyes off her: an unholy cross between Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara and Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond, layered with the bland contempt that comes only from Manhattan socialites.

During a visit to New York, working-class Ginger (Sally Hawkins, right) encourages her
husband, Augie (Andrew Dice Clay, center right) to seek investment advice from the
wealthy and privileged Hal (Alec Baldwin), an aggressive Wall Street shark married to
Jasmine (Cate Blanchett). Ginger figures there's no downside; after all, Jasmine is her
sister, and nothing is more important than family ... right?

Cate Blanchett’s title character in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine is a frightening creature: a woman so accustomed to aristocratic excess that she cannot fathom existence among the 99 percent. Yet she’s also a figure to be pitied, and that’s the hypnotic magic of Blanchett’s performance: We simultaneously loathe and feel sorry for her, wondering how somebody who once was an ordinary little girl, could have grown into an adult so cut off from her humanity.

She’s Marie Antoinette or Eva Braun: a woman who can’t precisely be described as evil, because she really don’t know any better. Morality, integrity, loyalty, simple kindness ... these are qualities suited only for the common herd. Jasmine swans above such flawed behavior; she lives only for her own tightly compartmentalized pleasures, and for the attention lavished upon her by a doting and über-wealthy husband.

Allen has written really close to the bone this time, with an unflinching dissection of the privileged, often vacuous wives who proudly stand alongside the Bernie Madoffs, as they blithely screw the rest of us. Do these women even perceive, let alone understand, the monsters they take to their beds each night?

Allen has resurrected his career, phoenix-like, more times than I can count, and he’s once again on a roll: perhaps the best thus far. Midnight in Paris was both clever and delightful: an adult fantasy that brought him another well-deserved Academy Award. Blue Jasmine, in turn, will do the same for Blanchett. I don’t care what comes out between now and Dec. 31; nobody will top her bravura performance in this film.

She’s nothing short of amazing, and Blue Jasmine stands among Allen’s finest works.

We meet Jasmine during a plane flight from New York to San Francisco, where she has arranged to live with her sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), while attempting to pull her life back together. Jasmine’s personality is revealed during this airborne prologue, for she has trapped a seat mate — an elderly woman too polite to object — into enduring a litany of self-centered justification.

We don’t get many pertinent details, merely enough to understand the sheer torture that the oblivious Jasmine is inflicting on her temporary companion.

Elysium: District 10?

Elysium (2013) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: R, for profanity, gore and strong bloody violence
By Derrick Bang

Based on the evidence thus far, filmmaker Neill Blomkamp has only one story to tell.

Elysium feels much like his previous film, District 9, writ larger: another saga of oppressed “aliens” seeking a way to rebel against their cruel and privileged overlords. The setting and opposing teams have changed slightly, and Blomkamp clearly has a bigger budget this time at bat, but the key plot points are essentially the same; even the hardware and weaponry look familiar.

His impulsive plans having failed yet again, Max (Matt Damon) finds himself trapped on
a medical table, while the coldly arrogant Delacourt (Jodie Foster) orders some
purloined computer data stripped from his brain ... not at all bothered by the fact that
this process will kill him.

That said, political oppression has been a big-screen sci-fi staple going all the way back to 1927’s Metropolis, and it often produces great drama. So we can forgive Blomkamp the familiarity ... this time. (He would be wise, however, to move in a different direction henceforth.)

The South African-born filmmaker has a solid eye and ear for social strife — no surprise, given his homeland — which contributed, in great part, to the narrative power of District 9. Now embraced by the seductive lure of Hollywood, Blomkamp has turned his disapproving eye on the United States, and its dysfunctional immigration policy; the results aren’t likely to be embraced by red staters.

The year is 2154, and the entire Earth has become an environmental wasteland, ruined by industrial excess, land mismanagement, resource depletion and various other unchecked global horrors we currently practice, with no eye toward future consequences. Every country, in turn, has become part of a planetwide ghetto, the 99 percent left to scrabble and squabble among themselves.

But not entirely. Movement and behavior are monitored by android peacekeepers that employ computer-chip tracking to maintain a veritable police state bereft of basic human decency. And humor: Just as it isn’t smart, in our here and now, to crack wise when stopped by a traffic cop, it is sheer folly to act smug with one of these gun-toting “law officers.”

George Orwell’s influence weighs heavily, and his vision has come to pass: Big Brother really is watching, and doing so from a massive orbiting space station dubbed Elysium, where the very wealthy have fled in order to enjoy a life of pleasure and privilege among lush gardens and sparkling architecture. Automated med-bays can repair, reconstruct or eradicate anything, from broken bones to cancer.

Blomkamp knows his science-fiction, Elysium being a verdant cross between the domed forests of 1972’s Silent Running, and the technological wonders of Larry Niven’s Ringworld novels.

Percy Jackson, Sea of Monsters: Mythbegotten

Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rating: PG, for fantasy action violence
By Derrick Bang

Conventional wisdom suggests the value of a winning formula.

Movie studies, infamous for getting things bass-ackwards, sometimes cling to a losing formula.

Having successfully invaded Polyphemus' lair and snatched the fabled Golden Fleece,
our young heroes — from left, Tyson (Douglas Smith), Clarisse (Levin Rambin), Grover
(Brandon T. Jackson), Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario) and Percy (Logan Lerman) —
discover that keeping their prize will be even more difficult.

2010’s Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief offered fabulous monsters, slick special effects and an A-list cast of cameo players ... and nothing else. The film was dumb, soulless and atrociously acted; the entire cast delivered every line with smirking condescension, as if mocking the material as a waste of time. Needless to say, if the actors don’t seem to believe in what they’re doing, we certainly won’t.

Critics dismissed the film with contempt, and it was justifiably loathed by fans of Rick Riordan’s teen-lit fantasy series; Craig Titley’s snarky script completely failed to respect the source novel. The biggest surprise? Chris Columbus occupied the director’s chair, and you’d certainly think that the guy who helmed the first two Harry Potter movies would understand how to bring fantasy to the big screen.

You’d think.

Despite earning only $89 million in the States — on a budget of $95, which qualifies as a failure — the results were far better worldwide, with a final tally of $226 million. Those numbers spell S-E-Q-U-E-L, despite everybody’s recognition that they were dealing with a dog.

And so now we’re graced with Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters ... which offers fabulous monsters and slick special effects, and is dumb, soulless and atrociously acted. Despite the presence of a new director (Thor Freudenthal) and scripter (Marc Guggenheim), little has changed. The young stars may be three years more mature, but their performances haven’t improved much. And it’s rather telling that the first film’s big names — Sean Bean, Pierce Brosnan, Uma Thurman, Steve Coogan, Rosario Dawson and Catherine Keener — opted out this time.

Indeed, we never catch the barest glimpse of the Olympian gods who played such an important role in the first film. Oh, they’re mentioned here, now and then, but that’s it. Instead of Zeus, Hades, Poseidon and Medusa, we get Hermes and Dionysus. Our favorite centaur, Chiron, now is played by Anthony Head (a fan favorite from the days of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), rather than Brosnan. Although I’ve no desire to slight the talents of the esteemed Mr. Head, whose work I admire, one gets the distinct impression that these filmmakers settled for the B Team.

Freudenthal deserves credit for attempting a more serious tone; he mostly eliminated the smug atmosphere that poisoned the first film. But Guggenheim’s script takes even more liberties with the second entry in Riordan’s book series, leaving us with an “adaptation” in name only. I’m sure Riordan's fans will be equally unhappy.

2 Guns: 2 droll 2 be taken seriously

2 Guns (2013) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: R, for violence, profanity and brief nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.2.13

This summer could be subtitled The Revenge of the Comic Book.

Or, perhaps, yet another reminder that imitation isn’t always the sincerest form of flattery.

Bobby (Denzel Washington, left) and Stig (Mark Wahlberg) eye each other warily,
navigating serious trust issues, while they wonder what to do with the drug kingpin
they've trapped in the trunk of their vehicle. As it turns out, that guy's gonna be the
least of their worries...

I don’t refer merely to obvious candidates such as Iron Man 3, Wolverine or Man of Steel. RED 2 and R.I.P.D. also are based on graphic novels, and the latter demonstrates the folly of believing that folks will queue up simply because something IS a big-screen adaptation of such a property.

Clever ideas are a great start, but they’re no substitute for a sharp screenplay that understands the need to sustain our involvement for the next few hours. Many of today’s one-shot graphic novels suffer from the same malady that infects numerous movies: a slick one-sentence concept that doesn’t know where to go from Page 3.

Happily, 2 Guns — derived from Steven Grant’s five-issue miniseries of the same title — rises above that level of mediocrity. Blake Masters’ screenplay is quite witty, and stars Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg get plenty of mileage from their snarky frenemy dynamic. If the core plot doesn’t always stand up to scrutiny, that probably wasn’t high on director Baltasar Kormákur’s goals anyway; he obviously set out to make a pleasurable popcorn flick, with enjoyable results. He achieves a tone that evokes pleasant memories of 1987’s Lethal Weapon.

As was true with RED 2, we’re not that bothered by whatever propels our central characters, as long as they keep entertaining us.

And, credit where due, this film’s twisty first act definitely keeps us guessing. If my next few paragraphs seem unduly vague or misleading, blame a desire to preserve at least some of the early surprises.

We meet Bobby Trench (Washington) and Michael “Stig” Stigman (Wahlberg) as they case the Tres Cruces Savings & Loan from a diner across the street in a small Texas border town. Their goal seems decidedly larcenous, but they can’t really be bad guys, because they flirt so coyly with the waitress, and because they’re our stars, fercryinoutloud.

One flashback later, it appears that Stig and Bobby are trying to set up Papi Greco (Edward James Olmos), a drug kingpin who does his dirty work in Mexico, while leading what seems an ordinary life as husband and father in an upscale Texas community. At least, it seems like this is what’s going down, but the edges quickly get fuzzy; far too many additional players pop up at the fringes of this undercover sting ... if indeed that’s the game in the first place.

The Wolverine: Claws for delight

The Wolverine (2013) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for intense sci-fi action, mild sensuality and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.26.13

I’ve never understood why critics sharpened their claws so gleefully while savaging 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Few bona-fide actors have inhabited a superhero role with the panache Hugh Jackman brings to this Canadian-born berserker, and that earlier solo adventure was just fine, in my book.

Logan (Hugh Jackman) finds himself helplessly manacled, his claws unable to extend,
as the sinister Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova) reveals that this imprisonment is
merely one element of her horrible plans. Still to appear: the dread Silver Samurai.

Sure, it lacked the wit and overall snap of The Avengers, but that’s true of most big-screen superhero epics. The more important observation is that X-Men Origins: Wolverine was far, far better than, say, Daredevil or either Fantastic Four bomb.

And, for the purposes of our discussion, Jackman’s newly released sequel. The Wolverine, is better still.

Writers Christopher McQuarrie, Mark Bomback and Scott Frank focus on the key element of Wolverine’s character: that he’s a modern ronin, a samurai without a lord or master to serve. This definition applies to the X-Men mythos in both comic books and big-screen adaptations, where Wolverine may or may not consider himself part of the team at any given moment, depending on recent events.

Building further on that core, McQuarrie & Co. have constructed a narrative from several of the X-Men/Wolverine comic book story arcs that found our clawed protagonist in Japan, a country that understands and practices the same warrior’s code of honor by which he lives.

Perhaps the surprise success of the big-screen adaptation of Kick-Ass had something to do with this, thanks to that saga’s flamboyant, sword-wielding character of Hit Girl; perhaps it’s mere coincidence. Whatever the reason, we finally get live-action embodiments of Mariko Yashida and Yukio — characters co-created in the Marvel Comics universe by writer Chris Claremont and artists John Byrne and Frank Miller — and brought to excellent life by Tao Okamoto and Rila Fukushima, respectively (although costume designer Isis Mussenden shouldn’t have based the latter’s look quite so heavily from the aforementioned Hit Girl).

Angst-ridden journeys of the soul always make good sagas, and this one’s no exception. The core plot doesn’t always hold together — the barrage of double- and triple-crosses makes it rather difficult to separate some of the good guys from the bad guys — but the destination isn’t nearly as important as the trip itself.

One other caveat: McQuarrie, Bomback and Frank assume that viewers either know the Marvel universe or have seen all previous X-Men films, which I regard as mildly presumptuous. For the benefit of newbies, then, a few key facts left unexplained:

Logan (Wolverine) is essentially immortal, thanks to a scientific process that laced his bones with the indestructible metal allow adamantium, and a “healing factor” that quickly repairs all wounds. He’s also much older than one would expect, and doesn’t show his age. Finally, he’s currently consumed with guilt and grief over having been forced to kill X-Men teammate Jean Grey, when she “went evil” as Dark Phoenix (that crisis depicted in 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand).

The To Do List: Better left undone

The To Do List (2013) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rating: R, for pervasive strong crude and sexual content, graphic dialogue, drug and alcohol use, and constant profanity, all involving teens
By Derrick Bang

Back in the day, youthful sexual explorations followed a common sports metaphor, starting with reaching first base and concluding with the obvious home run.

My, how things have changed.

At first, Fiona (Alia Shawkat, right) shares good friend Brandy's (Aubrey Plaza) elation
over the progress being made on her summer list of planned sexual accomplishments.
But like the so-called comedy in this film, Brandy eventually takes things too far, at
which point Fiona demonstrates that while she might talk the talk, she apparently
doesn't think much of people who walk the walk.

In these sexually liberated and quite raunchy days of the 21st century, that simple baseball metaphor has blossomed into the complexity of a 22-level video game. Libido-driven folks keeping score begin with quaint French kisses and hickies, progress through once-unspoken acts such as motorboating and teabagging, and ultimately, ah, climax with the horizontal bop itself.

At least, that’s what writer/director Maggie Carey would have us believe, with her smutty teen sex comedy, The To Do List.

Sadly, this new film is neither as witty nor as memorable as 2010’s Easy A, which made a star of Emma Stone, and to which The To Do List inevitably will be compared. While this new film’s star — the richly talented and still under-appreciated Aubrey Plaza — deserves a similar breakout hit, she won’t get it here. Carey’s film is too uneven, too clumsy and (to its detriment) too reflexively coarse, in the manner of various Judd Apatow or Farrelly brothers guys-behaving-badly yock-fests.

Ironically, Carey’s biggest problem is that she doesn’t have the courage to pursue her genre convictions. Her script is plenty dirty, but only at a potty-mouth level the Three Stooges would appreciate. She never achieves genuine heat or eroticism, and too many of Plaza’s fellow cast members work beneath their talents, their line readings stiff, unpersuasive and motivated more by writer’s fiat than narrative rational.

We should perhaps ask the basic question: Is this film intended to be genuinely sexy, or merely filthy? Because if the former was Carey’s intention, to any degree, she fouled out before reaching first base.

Her story is set in 1993, apparently to avoid granting its characters any exposure to the Internet porn that has become readily available since then. We meet the over-achieving Brandy Klark (Plaza) as she graduates from high school and gives a roundly jeered valedictory speech. Whatever her academic accomplishments, she has become infamous as both a teacher’s pet and a virgin, the latter epithet apparently far more heinous than the former.

Despite being a social pariah, Brandy has two gal pals — Fiona (Alia Shawkat) and Wendy (Sarah Steele) — who like her but agree that she could, well, loosen up a bit. To hear Fiona and Wendy talk, they’ve either performed or contemplated every act once relegated to the Kama Sutra or Dr. David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask).

I'm So Excited: Not by a long shot

I'm So Excited (2013) • View trailer 
One star. Rating: R, for strong crude and sexual content (all verbal), and drug use
By Derrick Bang

I’m still struggling to believe that Pedro Almodóvar had anything to do with this flimsy waste of celluloid.

In an effort to distract their passengers from the dire circumstances that are preventing
the plane from landing, three flight attendants — from left, Fajas (Carlos Areces),
Ulloa (Raúl Arévalo) and Joserra (Javier Cámara) — break into a hilariously
choreographed rendition of the Pointer Sisters' "I'm So Excited." This three-minute
sequence is absolutely the only thing worth watching in this bewildering bomb.

Almodóvar, the acclaimed Spanish filmmaker who brought us Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, All About My Mother, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and Volver?

That Pedro Almodóvar? Seriously?

Hard to imagine.

Almodóvar knows better than most that cheeky, exaggerated sensuality is a magical blend of setting, sharp dialogue, camera-friendly actors who radiate lust and, yes, artful nudity (the less expected and more inappropriate, the better).

I’m So Excited contains none of the above. Worse yet, Almodóvar has abandoned his (usually) progressive Western European sensibilities in favor of stale and vulgar homoerotic jokes: the sort of tiresome one-liners currently viewed as the height of sex humor by arrested American adolescents such as Seth Rogen and the rest of Judd Apatow’s repertory company.

I’ll give Almodóvar the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he deliberately spoofs timeworn gay male stereotypes here ... but that’s not apt to mollify viewers who will recoil from his mincing portrayal of three flight attendants. Not even Liberace was this swish.

On top of which, if Almodóvar removed every dialogue reference to fellatio — spoken by men, women and genders hard to determine — I suspect his entire script would clock in at fewer than 25 words. Never have so many men, some of them defiantly heterosexual, claimed to so thoroughly enjoy wrapping their mouths around ... um, you get the idea.

This might be amusing — even hilarious — under better circumstances. But absent context or back-story, it’s just a bunch of ill-defined characters with potty mouths and overcooked libidos. Never has polymorphous perversity sounded so ... well ... dull.

This film also looks cheap, with almost all of its “action” restricted to the cramped, obviously fake-set interior of an airplane. Brief detours are taken to a) an apartment; and b) a city street. Also not what you’d call budget-busters. Production costs couldn’t have topped $1.78.

The cast looks and sounds under-rehearsed, and the dialogue is forced, unpersuasive and (from the sound of things) frequently improvised. I’m amazed Almodóvar had the audacity to claim scripting credit; I see scant evidence of actual writing.

He also opens with a tease: a quick scene between Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz, leading us to hope that we’ll see more of them. No such luck. Their radiant faces — their naturalistic performances, and their obvious chemistry — vanish after a quick prologue. After that, we’re stuck with the B-Team. No, wait ... more like the P-Team.

The story then, such as it is:

Banderas and Cruz make their cameos as León and Jessica, members of the ground crew for Peninsula Airlines Flight 2549; thanks to a brief interruption, León fails to properly remove the large wheel chocks, prior to take-off.

We then join Flight 2549 during take-off, as the flight crew preps all passengers with the usual lecture about oxygen masks and seat flotation devices; this is our first glimpse of flight attendants Fajas (Carlos Areces), Ulloa (Raúl Arévalo) and Joserra (Javier Cámara).

Then, whoosh, time passes. The plane is quiet, which is no surprise; everybody in coach is fast asleep, having been doped with muscle relaxants (!). For some reason, the business class passengers have been allowed to remain awake. (I guess we’d have no movie otherwise, which I’d argue would have been a good thing.)

The reason for the doping, and for the worried expressions shared by pilot Alex Acero (Antonio De La Torre) and co-pilot Benito Morón (Hugo Silva), is that Flight 2549 is in trouble. It can’t land because the aforementioned chocks have interfered with the deployment of landing gear. The intended flight to Mexico City has been canceled; the plane just keeps circling, waiting for ground-based Folks In Charge to find and then prepare a runway for an emergency landing.

We now pause, for a moment of topicality.

Almodóvar can’t be blamed for bad timing; he certainly didn’t know that his film would gain its U.S. opening mere weeks after the Asiana Airlines crash in San Francisco. I’d like to think, however, that the folks at Sony Pictures Classics might have deemed release a wee bit tasteless, and elected to postpone. Absent that bit of prudence, we’re left with a low-rent sex comedy that would have been dreadful under the best of circumstances, but becomes even worse by attempting to mine humor from a situation that is seriously un-funny at this particular moment.

(Disney “waited” six months, until April 2002, to release Big Trouble — with its tasteless bomb-in-a-plane climax — in the wake of 9/11. That didn’t work either.)

Anyway...

With death a very real possibility, the business class passengers eventually confess the reasons for their trips: revelations apparently intended to be provocative and/or amusing.

Hardly.

Bruna (Lola Duenas), a self-proclaim psychic, frets that she may die a virgin; she can’t stop eyeing the impressive pants bulge of one fellow snoozing away in coach. A newlywed groom (Miguel Ángel Silvestre), actually a drug mule with a baggy of mescaline shoved up his fundament, pops pills into the mouth of his bride (Laya Martí) so that she’ll sleep through whatever happens next.

Gossip queen Norma (Cecilia Roth), actually a dominatrix who boasts of having slept with her country’s 600 most powerful men — while taping said encounters, for blackmail leverage — worries that this calamity is a rather ostentatious plot to kill her. Infante (José María Yazpik), a somewhat sinister fellow, keeps close counsel.

Corrupt businessman Mas (José Luis Torrijo), having fled just ahead of arrest back home, laments the ongoing estrangement from his daughter, who has embraced a provocative sexual lifestyle. Finally, soap opera star Ricardo Galán (Guillermo Toledo) has abandoned his most recent lover, while contrived circumstances bring a former lover (Blanca Suárez, as Ruth) back into his life.

Our brief sojourn with Ruth takes us back to the ground, for a subplot that appears to have been dragged in from another film. A better one, too, from what we see of it.

Back in the air, everybody gets drunk — including the pilots — in some cases will past the point of acute alcohol poisoning. That’s not funny; it’s just dumb. Inhibitions disappear, particularly after the application of mescaline-laced punch. Confessions emerge, none the slightest bit interesting. The bride demonstrates a talent for having sex in her sleep. Bruna has sex with the well-hung fellow in coach, while he sleeps.

Nobody undresses, not even a little. As Joe Bob Briggs might have groused, back in the day, we don’t even get a flash of side-boob during any of these couplings.

The film’s sole saving grace comes when the three gay caballeros — ah, flight attendants — wriggle and jiggle their way through a lively lip-synched and hilariously choreographed rendition of the Pointer Sisters’ “I’m So Excited” (hence the film’s title).

No doubt this scene soon will be extracted as a YouTube video, saving everybody the trouble of enduring the rest of this tawdry turkey.

Actually, I’m So Excited has one more virtue: It’s short. At 90 minutes, it’s only 87 minutes too long.

I don’t care how much you admire Almodóvar; this one must be skipped.

You’ve been warned.