Licorice Pizza: Quite warped

Licorice Pizza (2021) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for sexual candor, drug use and considerable profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

Well, this one’s all over the map.

 

That’s no surprise, since we’re dealing with writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson; outré is his calling card. Who could forget the rain of frogs toward the end of 1999’s Magnolia, or the freakishly violent finale in 2007’s There Will Be Blood?

 

Alana (Alana Haim) surprises herself by agreeing to act as chaperone and driver for her
new "business partner," Gary (Cooper Hoffman), and his younger brother, Greg
(Milo Herschlag).

Anderson always is more concerned with atmosphere, attitude and location, than anything remotely approaching credible human behavior. And there’s no denying that Licorice Pizza nails its 1973 San Fernando Valley setting: the clothes, cars, strip malls, seedy pop-culture palaces, and the vibrant, awakening youth culture sense that anything was possible, and anything could happen.

Anderson also handles much of the cinematography here, alongside Michael Bauman; between them and production designer Florencia Martin, they’ve re-created the razzle-dazzle Valley vibe to a degree that’s almost spooky. That said, this is a heightened reality, laced with sidebar characters who usually are more burlesque than believable.

 

In fairness, though, this is a kinder, gentler Anderson: possibly because — in his typically outlandish way — he intends this film as a valentine to the area where he grew up. The on again/off again mutual crush that bonds this saga’s two primary characters is quite sweet at times … even as everything around them becomes aggressively weird.

 

(The film gets its title, by the way, from a once-famous chain of record stores that ruled Southern California from 1969 to ’85.)

 

Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), a 15-year-old child star, meets cute with 25-year-old Alana Kane (Alana Haim) at his high school’s yearbook portrait day; she’s assisting the photographer. He boldly chats her up, much to her initially amused annoyance … but he’s so self-assured, so persistent, that she can’t help being curious.

 

Gary is an anomaly, in that all the adults in his orbit respect him as an equal (even if some roll their eyes when he leaves the room). He’s on familiar speaking terms with the manager at the iconic Tail o’ the Cock restaurant, who respectfully reserves Gary’s “special table” and also tolerates his presence at the bar (sipping only sodas, of course). Alana finds it hard to resist when he suggests that she meet him there, and it’s emotionally deeper than that; she surprises herself by accepting.

 

Although Hoffman’s Gary ostensibly dominates what subsequently transpires — frequently through sheer force of personality — this really is Alana’s story; she’s the character trying to figure out how to become a better version of herself, whereas Gary never really changes.

 

Alana is a failure-to-launch decades before that phrase became a thing, still living at home with her parents and two older sisters (Haim’s actual sisters, Danielle and Este), who also still are stuck with their parents. The high school photography gig obviously is just the latest in a long string of dead-end temp jobs that give Alana a reason to get up each morning.

 

Initially, she’s seduced more by Gary’s lifestyle and environment, than the boy himself. She agrees to become a combination chaperone/handler, leaving his mother Anita (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) more time to focus on the business side of his career. 

Flag Day: Don't raise it

Flag Day (2021) • View trailer

2.5 stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity, drug use and violence

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

The fact-based story here is compelling and astonishing: the saga of a young woman who survives not only a horrific parent — a pathological liar and toxic “entrepreneur” — but her own dangerous detour into life on the streets, before achieving an epiphany that helps her not only survive, but thrive.

 

Jennifer (Dylan Penn), determing to reform her deadbeat, unreliable father (Sean Penn),
moves in with him and undertakes a serious makeover effort.

Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth’s script is adapted from journalist Jennifer Vogel’s searing 2004 memoir, Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father’s Counterfeit Life. Vogel also granted considerable assistance during production, so she clearly approved — and assured the authenticity (for the most part) — of this depiction of her early years.

Scary thought.

 

Director Sean Penn clearly intended this as a showcase for his actress daughter, Dylan, and she does her old man proud; her persuasive, deeply moving performance is all over the emotional map. We grieve for her character. Repeatedly.

 

Too bad Dylan’s old man didn’t return the favor.

 

As director, Sean Penn’s aggressively arty “style” pretty much destroys this film. His unrelenting, tight-tight-tight close-ups and up-the-nostrils angles are insufferable, and he relies on them throughout the entire film. It’s the ultimate insult: the lazy, TV-soap-opera affectation of a director who doesn’t trust his actors to carry a given moment.

 

Penn also favors jittery camerawork — I wondered if cinematographer Daniel Moder had been ordered to bounced on a trampoline — and often detours into blurry, grainy, 16mm “memory moments” intended to mimic sloppy home movies.

 

Just about every time Dylan Penn hits a crucial dramatic scene, her father steals focus by calling too much attention to his self-indulgent directorial tics and hiccups.

 

It’s an impressive job of sabotage … which is pretty damn ironic. How could he not have realized that he was ruining his own daughter’s fine work?

 

After a brief prologue in the early 1990s — which telegraphs the story’s conclusion — we’re introduced to the dysfunctional Vogel family: father John (Sean Penn), wife Patty (Katheryn Winnick) and adolescent children Jennifer (Jadyn Rylee) and Nick (Beckam Crawford). The adult Jennifer (Dylan Penn) narrates the details of their tempestuous upbringing, highlighting the degree to which John’s chronic unreliability exacerbates Patty’s fragile insecurity.

 

It’s the mid-1970s. John blows what little money he makes on flamboyant gestures, and then can’t make rent or put food on the table. Patty knows it’s just a matter of time before they’ll once again throw all their worldly possessions into the beat-up station wagon, and drive to some other Midwestern town, where John will somehow con their way into another short-term home.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: Bittersweet lament

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rating: PG, for occasional crude language and mild profanity, and a bit of fantasy violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.3.14

James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” originally appeared in The New Yorker on March 18, 1939, and subsequently went on to become one of the most frequently anthologized American short stories. It subsequently begat a charming 1947 Danny Kaye film, a 1960 stage adaptation — as part of the revue A Thurber Carnival — and a woefully underappreciated 1969-70 TV sitcom, My World and Welcome to It, that barely scraped along for a single season (and still hasn’t been released on home video, drat the luck!).

Walter (Ben Stiller), desperate to make an impression on Cheryl (Kristen Wiig), imagines
all sorts of adventurous meet-cute moments, as with this fantasy of appearing before her
as a suave and rugged Arctic explorer

Now, rather unexpectedly, Thurber’s whimsical day in the life of a mild-mannered nebbish has become a poignant lament on the demise of print journalism. From the wild ’n’ crazy Ben Stiller, no less. Who could have imagined?

Not I; that’s for certain.

Initially, though, Stiller’s film — he directed and co-scripted (with Steve Conrad), in addition to starring in the title role — lives down to my worst expectations. The opening half-hour slides clumsily into slapstick nonsense as we meet Walter, the “Negative Assets Manager” at Life Magazine. That droll job title actually refers to Walter’s selection and careful handling of the dynamic photographs that have characterized the publication.

He toils quietly in the Time Life Building’s sub-sub basement, helped only by a single assistant, Hernando (a disarmingly dry Adrian Martinez), while fantasizing about all the astonishingly brave and bold moments that have been captured on the images he has handled. Walter also imagines working up the courage to approach co-worker Cheryl Melhoff (Kristen Wiig), invariably concocting a scenario that involves saving her life, or otherwise impressing her greatly.

When back on earth, he can barely muster a morning greeting ... despite the fact, as we can tell, that she’s clearly interested.

Although set in the modern day, Stiller and Conrad have re-invented Life’s timeline in order to suit their purpose: to follow Walter on what becomes the worst day of his life, as the magazine’s corporate owners announce the termination of its print edition. Just as life has passed Walter by, life now is about to pass Life by.

Even his job has been rendered superfluous, since the advent of digital photography has wholly transformed the art and craft of photojournalism. But not for one lone hold-out: the dynamic Sean O’Connell (a cameo by Sean Penn), an old-school camera jockey who’ll still roar toward the heart of an exploding volcano, snapping pictures while standing on the wings of a biplane.

But on the boring ground, the magazine’s conversion to dot-com oblivion is being overseen by the new Managing Director in Charge of The Transition: the consummately arrogant, presumptuously inconsiderate and relentlessly intimidating Ted Hendricks (Adam Scott). Sensing a victim who won’t fight back, the bullying Hendricks wastes no opportunity to belittle Walter ... who simply makes matters worse with his tendency to drift into occasional fantasy fugues.

Gangster Squad: Cheeky, audacious portrait of 1950s Los Angeles

Gangster Squad (2013) • View trailer
3.5 stars. Rating: R, for nonstop violence, gore and profanity
By Derrick Bang

It’s a can’t-miss formula that goes back to the days of vintage Hollywood Westerns: the few against the many, particularly in a righteous cause.

Electronics nerd Conwell Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi, center) overhears some delectable
information from the bug he planted in mobster Mickey Cohen's home, while squad
members John O'Mara (Josh Brolin, left) and Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling) determine
how best to use this revelation.

This already engaging dynamic was enhanced by turning the underdog heroes into rag-tag misfits, with the genre expanding to include war and crime (or the war on crime). Some of the best examples have become cinema classics, such as The Magnificent Seven — and its forbearer, The Seven Samurai — and The Dirty Dozen. My own list of personal favorites includes Where Eagles Dare.

Director Brian De Palma upgraded an early 1960s TV show and brought Sean Connery an Academy Award as the moral center of 1987’s The Untouchables. A decade later, that film’s 1930s Chicago setting shifted to 1950s Los Angeles with director Lee Tamahori’s stylish handling of Mulholland Falls. Even post-WWII crime thrillers weren’t quite this noir.

All of which brings us to director Ruben Fleischer’s energetic Gangster Squad, based on Paul Lieberman’s book of the same title, and adapted with snap by Will Beall, who employs the same crisp sparkle he has brought to several episodes of television’s Castle. The dialogue sizzles, the dames are delectable, the actors chew their lines with the snarling fury of a hungry lion tearing into a steak, and the action has the rat-a-tat ferocity of the Tommy guns wielded on both sides.

Although Lieberman brought veteran journalistic skills to his well-researched account of gangster Mickey Cohen’s attempt to seize control of Los Angeles during the 1950s, this film probably bears no more relation to actual history than Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Some of the names will be recognized, but the execution here feels more like Mission: Impossible and L.A. Confidential, with a soupçon of 21st century sass.

And — sad to say — plenty of violence and some unnecessary gore. The story may demand a vicious streak, but must we really watch a man torn in half after being chained to two cars accelerating in opposite directions? Surely that image could have been left to our imaginations, rather than splattered across the screen ... along with the yummy glimpse of wild dogs tearing into the remains.

But then, Fleischer also is the gleeful maniac who upped the snark count in walking dead flicks, with 2009’s Zombieland, so I guess it’s in his genes. And, in fairness, everything that follows the aforementioned dismemberment — a prologue, of sorts, to set the mood — involves somewhat more palatable gunplay. And a few knives. And some acid. And ... well, you get the idea.

The Tree of Life: Utterly lifeless

The Tree of Life (2011) • View trailer for The Tree of Life
No stars (turkey). Rating: PG-13, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.3.11


At one point during writer/director Terrence Malick’s unforgivably tedious slog of a movie, Brad Pitt’s Mr. O’Brien — while listening to a favorite piece of classical music, and no doubt wanting to comment upon the elusive search for perfection — explains that the composer recorded it 65 times ... and still wasn’t satisfied.

Jack (Hunter McCracken, right) lacks the patience to pull weeds and tend a
garden in the exacting manner demanded by his overbearing, short-tempered
father (Brad Pitt), who invariably takes the boy's "failings" as a personal slight.

A dangerous bit of dialogue, to insert into this dull, dreary and disjointed mess.

At my most generous, I might imagine that Malick intends his film to be more tone poem than typical narrative: more mood piece than conventional drama.

But I’m not inclined to be generous. The notoriously fussy Malick filmed this yawner three years ago, then spent the intervening time fine-tuning the footage in the editing bay.

He should have fine-tuned further.

Frankly, he should have given up entirely, and done unsuspecting viewers a favor.

The Tree of Life isn’t just bad; it’s laughably, crushingly awful. Unwatchable. Dull beyond description. Incomprehensible. Self-indulgently ridiculous.

Having said that, I’ve no doubt this film will speak to New Agers who love dissecting every last syllable of every last word in overly pompous poetry. Or, to put it another way, Malick’s approach will be adored by those who found the “star gate” sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey to be rich with theological grace.

As opposed to the rest of us, who kept checking our watches and wondering when Stanley Kubrick would get on with it, fercryinoutloud.

Kubrick actually is a good comparison, particularly later in his career, when he, too, was taking years and years to make a single film. Malick has made only five since his big-screen debut, with 1973’s Badlands. The second one, 1978’s Days of Heaven, remains his most mainstream work; two full decades would pass before the next one, 1998’s The Thin Red Line. Since then, he also unleashed 2005’s The New World.

Malick shares Kubrick’s desire to make every frame so gorgeous that it could be extracted, mounted and hung in a museum; in fairness, yes, the cinematography and composition are that gorgeous, often that powerful. But if I want to look at paintings, I visit a museum; motion pictures are so named because, well, they’re supposed to move.

Fair Game: Cheaters prosper

Fair Game (2010) • View trailer for Fair Game
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for brief profanity and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang


I can’t imagine how he did it.

You’re wakened in the middle of the night by soft rustling and an empty spot in the bed; you hasten downstairs just in time to catch your wife quietly leaving, suitcase packed. She smiles apologetically, sorry to have bothered you, explains that all the necessary details for the next few days are on a note on the refrigerator.

After her life has been ruined by a heinous news leak, Valerine Plame (Naomi
Watts) and her husband, Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), argue over how best to
"fight back" ... and, indeed, whether it's even possible to successfully wage
a war of words against the White House.

You stare at each other. You finally break the silence, voicing the thoughts that must run through your mind every time this scenario takes place: Where are you going? How long will you be gone? How would I even know if something went wrong?

Her gaze softens; she pauses, then gives the answer that is part rote, part edict, part private joke: “I’m going to Cleveland.”

Except she isn’t, and you both know it.

Valerie Plame and her husband, Joe Wilson, must have repeated this ritual scores of times. She never went to Cleveland; as a member of the CIA’s covert ops team, she’d frequently wind up halfway around the world. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, as leader of the agency’s Joint Task Force on Iraq, she was responsible for infiltrating Saddam Hussein’s weapons program.

Back at home, though, Plame was simply a wife and mother, raising two young twins with Wilson: a former ambassador to Niger, acknowledged hero after facing off Hussein in the immediate wake of Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Their friends knew her as a venture capitalist; she tended to remain quiet during the politically charged conversations that took place when they invited folks over for dinner.

Director Doug Liman and screenwriters Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth begin Fair Game quietly, almost casually, sketching the workaday dynamic between Plame (Naomi Watts) and Wilson (Sean Penn). They’re polar opposites in temperament: She’s calm and methodical; he’s brash and impulsive. She knows how and when to remain silent; he can’t help calling somebody an idiot if the conversation moves into “stupid territory.”

Milk: Standing tall

Milk (2008) • View trailer for Milk
Four stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity, sexual candor and brief violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.4.08
Buy DVD: Milk • Buy Blu-Ray: Milk [Blu-ray]


Serendipity is fascinating.

At the point director Gus Van Sant began work on Milk, California's Proposition 8 probably hadn't even been drafted, let alone transformed into the ugliest campaign of the just-concluded election. At some point during filming and post-production, of course, the film's cast and crew must've noticed the rising storm in the Golden State ... but, even then, completing the picture and securing a release at precisely this point in time, literally on the heels of the Prop 8 results, would have been an impressive feat.

After mainstreaming his image and carefully courting important neighborhood
allies — and thanks to a successful ballot initiative that replaces citywide
representation with more regional district elections — Harvey Milk (Sean
Penn, center) triumphs during his third run for the San Francisco Board of
Supervisors. But the hard work is just beginning...

If Van Sant and Focus Features pulled it off deliberately, more power to them.

If it's sheer coincidence ... well, such things have happened before. (The China Syndrome comes to mind.)

Because while Milk would have been regarded as just another biopic — albeit an engrossing and superbly acted one — at any other point in history, its release now will be linked forever to the real-world events that evoke such a sickening echo of what happened in San Francisco almost 20 years ago to this day.

Although Van Sant's film is fueled by Sean Penn's skillfully shaded portrayal of Harvey Milk, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black also deserves considerable credit for the way he has condensed six tumultuous years in his subject's life, while still paying attention to both Milk's public and private life.

This won't be an easy film for homophobes to watch, since Van Sant and Black unapologetically deal with Milk's love life ... albeit with a level of tasteful restraint rarely applied to heterosexual coupling these days, which often exploit as much frontal female nudity as possible. In comparison, Van Sant is fairly discreet.

But then I suspect this film's audience won't include too many of the people who contributed — either financially, or through their votes — to the recent passage of Prop 8. They are excoriated in absentia here by the way this film indicts the ugly behavior of Bible-thumping activist Anita Bryant and California State Senator John Briggs.

Although gay issues continue to be a lightning rod, we may perhaps take comfort from the fact that far fewer people are willing to be as bestial as Bryant and Briggs were, two decades ago. The former lobbied successfully for the repeal of gay rights ordinances in St. Paul, Minn., Wichita, Kan., and Eugene, Ore.; the latter sponsored 1978's Proposition 6, seeking to ban gays from teaching in California public schools, and to remove known homosexuals and their supporters from their posts.

Talk about witch hunts...

All these events are covered in Van Sant's film, which begins in New York in 1972, as Milk meets and then moves to San Francisco with Scott Smith (James Franco). Seeking a haven from the police brutality in the Big Apple — where cops routinely bust and rough up "queers" on trumped-up charges — the two settle in the Castro District and open a camera shop.

What Just Happened: Nothing much

What Just Happened (2008) • View trailer for What Just Happened
Three stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity, brief (but shocking) violence, fleeting nudity and drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.31.08
Buy DVD: What Just Happened • Buy Blu-Ray: What Just Happened? [Blu-ray]


I'm not sure it's possible for a film to satirize Hollywood at this late date.

Back in the days of Sunset Boulevard and The Bad and the Beautiful, Tinseltown was a largely mysterious dream factory that hypnotized Midwestern ingenues, discarded most of them, but nurtured a chosen few and made them stars who truly were, at the time, much larger than life.

While Ben (Robert De Niro, center) and the nebbishy Dick (John Turturro, right)
watch apprehensively, Bruce Willis (left, playing himself) places the first spade
full of dirt on the coffin of a Hollywood agent who unexpectedly took his life.

Scathing cinema indictments about the film industry therefore were greeted with curiosity and considerable interest, particularly when such pictures cut close enough to the bone to raise the wrath of studio bigwigs who worried that a composite character looked a little too familiar.

But we now live in a media fishbowl: an era of TV gossip shows such as Entertainment Tonight, where celebrity misbehavior and studio venality are as commonplace as beer and pretzels. Nothing about the process is secret or even mysterious any more; Terry Gilliam's heroic battle with Universal Pictures, over the integrity of his script for Brazil, has become the stuff of legend. Similar tales fill every issue of magazines such as Entertainment Weekly.

Even the subtler elements of filmmaking have become tabloid fodder, as when soundtrack composer Gabriel Yared broke the code of silence and orchestrated a public meltdown when his score for Troy was summarily dismissed and replaced by hackwork from James Horner. Such musical substitutions no longer are carefully guarded studio secrets; we now know all about Henry Mancini's rejected score for Hitchcock's Frenzy, or Alex North's rejected score for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Goodness, you can buy the latter score, and compare it to what Stanley Kubrick used instead.

All of which explains why What Just Happened, despite quite engaging performances from star Robert De Niro and several key supporting players, just isn't very interesting. Despite its wholly authentic pedigree — adapted by actual Hollywood producer Art Linson (The Untouchables, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Fight Club and last year's Into the Wild, among many others) from his wonderfully salacious memoir, What Just Happened: Bitter Hollywood Tales from the Front Line — what emerges in director Barry Levinson's film is just a lot of been there, done that.

Let's see...

• A protagonist too married to his job to sustain any actual relationships: check.

• The obligatory poke at laughably stupid sessions with a shrink: check.

• An on-set tantrum by an overpaid star: check.

• The agent too cowed by his clients to rein in their narcissistic behavior: check.

• The nubile young cuties willing to sleep their way into a career: check.

• The devastated indie filmmaker who feels betrayed when ordered to re-cut the ending of his "challenging" film: check.

I'm actually tempted to read Linson's book, because I'm sure it's much more aggressively and hilariously outrageous than what he and Levinson have chosen to adapt here.