The Big Year: For the birders

The Big Year (2011) • View trailer for The Big Year
3.5 stars. Rating: PG, for mild profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.14.11


The combined billing of Steve Martin, Owen Wilson and Jack Black immediately suggests wild ’n’ crazy one-upsmanship, but — happily — The Big Year is rather sweet, leaning more toward mild whimsy than unrestrained slapstick.

The battle lines are drawn quickly, when three dedicated birders — from left,
Kenny (Owen Wilson), Stu (Steve Martin) and Brad (Jack Black) — decide to
try for a "Big Year," by spotting more bird species in 365 days than anybody
else. But will the result be worth the necessary sacrifices?

Credit director David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada, Marley & Me), who clearly understands the importance of reasonably grounded characters. Then, too, Frankel also has a can’t-miss premise in Howard Franklin’s screenplay, which is “inspired by” Mark Obmascik’s 2004 book.

Obmascik was a journalist with the Denver Post when he wrote this more-or-less factual account of a rather bizarre “extreme sport” among birders, known as the North American Big Year. Participants spend 365 days chasing across the continental United States and Canada, compiling bird sightings and hoping to spot more species than anybody else. There is no prize, beyond the thrill of the hunt and the glory of peer acknowledgment.

Obmascik followed three top contenders in the 1998 challenge; these men, in turn, have been brought to life — more or less — by Martin, Wilson and Black.

The reigning Big Year champion, with an all-time high score of 732 sightings, is Kenny Bostick (Wilson), a contractor by trade who is looking to defend his title ... much to the dismay of his wife, Jessica (Rosamund Pike), who’s looking to start a family. Bostick is simultaneously the object of admiration and scorn among birders; they love to hear his stories, and they grudgingly admire his success.

But they also loathe his smug, know-it-all attitude. Everybody would love to see Kenny lose his crown; at the same time, there’s no question that he displays a level of single-minded dedication that deserves to be recognized.

Stu Preissler is a wealthy industrialist who, thus far, has let work interfere with family life and personal dreams. He has twice retired from the company he founded and built into a corporate titan; he hopes, this time, to walk away clean and make a serious bid for Big Year fame. Stu’s wife, Edith (JoBeth Williams), couldn’t be more supportive.

Last — and, in his own mind, least — is Brad Harris (Black), a nuclear plant software coder who hates his dead-end job and pines for some way to make a more significant mark. Brad looks back at a failed marriage and earlier failed careers; he lives at home with a mother who adores him (Dianne Wiest, as Brenda) and a father (Brian Dennehy, as Raymond) who regards him as a no-account doofus unable to see anything through.

Trouble is, Brad secretly fears that his father may be right.

It's Complicated: Is it too complicated?

It's Complicated (2009) • View trailer for It's Complicated
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: R, for drug content and frank sexual dialogue
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.24.09
Buy DVD: It's Complicated • Buy Blu-Ray: It's Complicated [Blu-ray]

Eyebrows are likely to lift, not far into It's Complicated, when Meryl Streep's Jane Adler speaks wistfully of a home remodel that finally will give her "the kitchen she's always dreamed of" ... a statement she makes while standing in a kitchen most of us would kill for, in a luxurious and rambling country home that resembles a presidential summer retreat.

Yes, writer/director Nancy Meyers' film is another one of those romantic comedies that we all can identify with so easily, since it involves only White People With More Money Than God. You'll not find a single African-American, Latino or Asian face in this entire picture, which makes it a rather curious throwback to the lavish Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers dance films of the 1930s.

Jake (Alec Baldwin, center right) and his much younger second wife, Agness
(Lake Bell, far right), are quite amused by the enthusiasm that Jane (Meryl
Streep) and Adam (Steve Martin) have brought to a party. But these giddy high
spirits aren't self-induced; Jane and Adam rather naughtily split a joint before
entering the room, in an effort to "take the edge off." They succeed...

Those pictures were intended to take audiences away, if only for a few hours, from the grim realities of the real-world Depression; to a degree, the ploy was successful. Funny thing, though; my reaction to It's Complicated and its financial largess involves far more irritation than capricious wish-fulfillment.

Jane apparently gets her bottomless bank account from her thriving bakery/restaurant, always packed to the gills even in these discouraging times. And while we can assume that ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin), a successful attorney, ponied up a substantial settlement during contentious divorce proceedings, many years ago, I'm still not sure this would justify such a house in tony Santa Barbara.

Such issues make Meyers' film feel oddly retro, as if it hopped a time machine from Hollywood's Golden Age. The core premise — divorcée embarks on a hot affair with her ex — has the potential for the sort of screwball comedy riffs delivered so well by the likes of Cary Grant and Irene Dunn, back in the day. (Appropriately enhanced by 21st century smutty dialogue, of course.)

But the "complicated" part of this film — the genuine pain and angst the affair brings both to its primary protagonists and a gaggle of secondary characters, notably Jane and Jake's three adult children — feels far more European. Indeed, at one point Jake even comments that he finds the situation "very French."

These two moods — American screwball comedy and sophisticated French sex farce — don't really mesh all that well. As a result, the film feels a bit "off" and unbalanced, although you may be at pains to identify the primary source of your dissatisfaction, upon exiting the theater.

On the other hand, Streep and Baldwin — ably supported by Steve Martin and John Krasinski — embrace this uneven material with the persuasive conviction we'd expect from top-flight stage actors in a production of King Lear. The cast is far superior to Meyers' screenplay, and this likely will make It's Complicated far more popular than it deserves to be.

The Pink Panther 2: Pale pink

The Pink Panther 2 (2009) • View trailer for The Pink Panther 2
Two stars (out of five). Rating: PG, for cartoonish violence and mild vulgarity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.5.09
Buy DVD: The Pink Panther 2 • Buy Blu-Ray: The Pink Panther 2 [Blu-ray]


Following a theatrical run that stalled after two months in the spring of 2006, Steve Martin’s first stab at updating The Pink Panther tallied a rather unspectacular $82.2 million in the United States ... against an estimated cost of $80 million.

Hardly a result likely to make any reasonably savvy studio exec jump for joy.

The dim-witted Inspector Clouseau (Steve Martin, far right), believing that he
has "sol-vedd the case," attempts to apprehend the villain with a customary
lack of restraint; Clouseau's fellow detectives — from left, Pepperidge (Alfred
Molina), Vicenzo (Andy Garcia) and Kenji (Yuki Matsuzaki) — watch
helplessly and hope for the best. As do the rest of us...

Why, then, are we suffering through a sequel?

But yes indeed, Martin’s bumbling Inspector Clouseau is back on the case, this time in alliance with a “dream team” of detectives from various countries, all anxious to apprehend a criminal mastermind who has been stealing the world’s most priceless treasures.

It’s perhaps fair to admit that director Harald Zwart’s film is no worse than its predecessor, which was helmed by other hands; Zwart’s efforts on 2003’s Agent Cody Banks probably gave him all the experience he needed to stage-manage a similarly broad farce involving France’s most notoriously incompetent cop.

Besides, one rather doubts that Zwart controlled his star to any degree; this is Martin’s show — he also shares scripting credit with Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber — and he obviously wanted another crack at the character made much more famous by Peter Sellers, whose similarly slapstick antics were overseen by a far better filmmaker (Blake Edwards).

The trouble is, Pink Panther 2 also isn’t any better than Martin’s debut shot at this property. Sure, the family-friendly PG rating is valid; nothing here will annoy or offend, and younger viewers will adore the way Martin slams through — and gets slammed by — people, vehicles, buildings and assorted bits of stagecraft. This is elementary destruction-derby filmmaker: the broader the better.

For the old-timers in the audience, think Laurel and Hardy, but with a much bigger budget.

The frustrating part, though, is that at times this film hovers at the outer fringes of being better. Zwart and Martin simply don’t know when to let a potentially great gag exit the stage gracefully; they always push it three steps further, to the point of eye-rolling tedium.

When Clouseau insists on selecting a bottle of wine to match his dinner at a fancy restaurant, for example, the resulting chaos is brilliant: The large wine rack slowly tips, releasing bottle after bottle, which Martin adroitly fields and hurls to helpful waiters and patrons. It’s about a minute of impressively choreographed physical comedy. But then the gag’s giddy delights face, when Clouseau subsequent burns down the restaurant.

That’s not the icing on the cake; it’s a soufflé suddenly gone flat. And it happens again and again in this film.