The Many Saints of Newark: Far from celestial

The Many Saints of Newark (2021) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for strong violence, pervasive profanity, sexual content and nudity

Available via: HBO Max and movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

I’ve never before seen a bait-and-switch movie.

 

Fans approaching this film anticipating the origin and molding of Tony Soprano — a quite reasonable expectation, given the way The Many Saints of Newark has been marketed — are certain to be disappointed.

 

When his father returns home after a four-year prison stretch, teenage Tony
(Michael Gandolfini, left) — uncertain what to say or do — must be encouraged by
his "uncle" Dickie (Alessandro Nivola) to go with his heart.

This is, instead, a years-long study of a slowly building turf war between New Jersey’s Italian Mafiosi — which, yes, includes numerous individuals who will, in time, become the running characters on the six-season HBO series — and competitors spawned by the rising Black power movement. The young Tony Soprano is, at best, a very minor character in these events … and, more crucially, the David Chase/Lawrence Konner script gives absolutely no indication of what will trigger the kid’s eventual rise to power.

I’ll take that a step further: As clumsily played by Michael Gandolfini — the late James Gandolfini’s son, in a bit of stunt casting that bespeaks sentimentality rather than common sense — there’s no way this pasty, sullen, self-centered mope ever could become the adult Tony Soprano that we loved and loathed. Fuhgeddaboudit.

 

What we’re left with, instead, is a mildly absorbing, Godfather-esque crime saga centered on the complex private and professional relationships between the Soprano and Moltisanti families. Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola) is the Al Pacino-esque central character who, during his more rational moments, attempts to maintain unity while tending to his end of the “family business.”

 

Sadly, Dickie — very well played by Nivola — is prone to explosive bursts of temper, with dire results.

 

This saga is occasionally narrated — in a cheeky bit of storytelling — by Michael Imperioli’s Christopher Moltisanti, speaking from beyond the grave. (We recall, from the series, that Tony Soprano ultimately killed him.) Christopher therefore establishes the groundwork for a chronicle that begins before he was born.

 

Unfortunately, it quickly becomes obvious that writers Chase and Konner have laid out far more than this single two-hour film can resolve, with any degree of satisfaction. Too many sidebar events get short shrift, or no shrift at all; this overly ambitious narrative screams for the long-form episodic treatment enjoyed by the HBO series.

 

Matters aren’t helped by the fact that the Italians share the stage with Harold McBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr.), a childhood friend of Dickie’s who now — on his behalf — oversees the numbers racket in the Central Ward, Newark’s predominantly Black neighborhood. Odom’s performance is thoughtful and multi-layered; Harold is intelligent, ambitious and angered by the circumstance of skin color that thwarts a desire for his own piece of the action.

 

Frankly, Harold deserves his own separate movie.

Godzilla, King of the Monsters: Gawd-awful

Godzilla, King of the Monsters (2019) • View trailer 
One star. Rated PG-13, for relentless monster carnage and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang

Sigh.

I’ve seen a lot of stupid over the years, but this one takes every cake in the bakery.

Not yet having realized that she's standing alongside a deranged sociopath, young
Madison (Millie Bobby Brown, right) watches while her mother, Emma (Vera Farmiga),
activates a whatzit in order to unleash a whozit.

Rarely has a big-studio blockbuster been directed this clumsily, written this poorly, and acted this atrociously. Doctoral theses could be written, about everything wrong with this misbegotten mess.

It’s a $200 million embarrassment.

When a film is this bad, every minute wasted with it — and we’re looking at 131 minutes here — is an exercise in put-me-out-of-my-misery tedium. Root canal surgery would be preferable.

This second entry in the modern Godzilla series once again demonstrates the folly of pleasing too many international masters, given that this is a co-production by Warner Bros. and China’s Legendary Entertainment. In theory, that should be a good thing, since it assures international casting; in practice, it has been the death of quality cinema.

Recent exhibits of shame include Skyscraper, Pacific Rim: Uprising, Man of Steel and, yes, the previous Godzilla. Among many others.

Each one is characterized by noisy, cataclysmic, landscape-leveling mayhem that goes on and on and on and on. Along with atrociously dumb dialogue, and performances so wooden they could warp.

And — worse yet in this case, with respect to emotional resonance — people who mostly stand around, slack-jawed, impotently staring at screens, or out windows. It’s difficult, nay impossible, to get involved with characters in a thriller of this sort, unless they’re pro-active and do something to make a difference.

One of this film’s major stars checks out so quickly, we scarcely have time to register the individual’s presence.

Three-quarters of the way into this debacle, somebody finally does something heroic. And then there’s an act of noble self-sacrifice, and for a moment — just a fleeting moment, but still — we actually care. A teeny-weeny bit.

Prior to that…

The Commuter: Catch the next train

The Commuter (2018) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated PG-13, for action violence and occasional profanity
By Derrick Bang

When Lewis Carroll’s Alice quite reasonably suggests that one can’t believe impossible things, the Queen of Hearts insists that “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

The queen would have been right at home with this movie.

When Joanna (Vera Farmiga) — a total stranger — sits opposite Michael (Liam Neeson)
and proposes a mysterious "what if?" scenario, he assumes that she's merely passing the
time during their commute. Increasingly unlikely events quickly will demonstrate that
she's completely serious...

Director Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Commuter is a hilariously ludicrous start to the cinematic new year: a thriller that makes absolutely no sense and survives on momentum alone ... until it doesn’t.

The script — assign the blame to Byron Willinger, Philip de Blasi and Ryan Engle — sails right past improbable and far-fetched, and heads straight into preposterous. It demands a suspension of disbelief far beyond the capability of mere mortals.

Theater ushers will have quite a task after each screening, carefully scooping up all the viewer eyeballs that have rolled right out of their sockets.

This storyline probably began with the intriguing notion that regular commuters — despite sharing (in this case) the same New York train, five days a week, 52 weeks a year — really don’t know much about the folks with whom they exchange cheerful greetings twice each day. What secrets might be concealed behind those superficial smiles?

Insurance salesman Michael MacCauley (Liam Neeson) finds out one day, when his late-afternoon trip home is interrupted by an enigmatic woman (Vera Farmiga, as Joanna) who sits in the opposite chair and strikes up a conversation. She behaves like a friendly, flirty psychologist, posing a “What would you do for $100,000?” scenario.

Michael indulges her (already unlikely, on a New York City train).

Perhaps, being well read, he recognizes this riff on Richard Matheson’s 1970 short story, “Button, Button,” in which a mysterious man gives a poverty-stricken couple a box with a button, promising $200,000 if they push the button, which will kill “someone whom you don’t know.” (It was filmed as an episode of the 1985-86 revival of The Twilight Zone, and then again in 2009, as the feature film The Box.)

Joanna departs at the next station, with an ambiguous comment that suggests her scenario isn’t all that fictitious. Michael, curious, investigates ... and finds a percentage of the cash, hidden right where she promised. At which point, she calls his smart phone, insists that he now has no choice but to comply with her demands ... lest his wife (Elizabeth McGovern) and son be harmed.

Michael’s task: to find the person on the train who “doesn’t belong,” is carrying a bag, and answers to the name of “Prin.” Before the train reaches the end of the line.

The Judge: Contempt of court

The Judge (2014) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated R, for profanity and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang

Some stories, despite an engaging premise and a solid opening act, eventually work themselves into an unfortunate corner.

When Hank (Robert Downey Jr., left) reluctantly agrees to help defend his father (Robert
Duvall, center) against a murder charge, he first must undo the damage unintentionally
caused by inattentive local attorney C.P. Kennedy (Dax Shepard).

Sadly, that’s the case with The Judge, a well-cast and tightly plotted legal thriller that gets considerable mileage from the tempestuous, high-octane pairing of Robert Duvall and Robert Downey Jr., as a severely estranged father and son.

Tightly plotted, that is, until the film wears out its welcome with an increasingly contrived and deeply unsatisfying third act ... by which point director David Dobkin’s 141-minute drama has become at least half an hour too long.

Dobkin certainly draws excellent performances from his stars and their supporting players: no problem there. But his writing experience hails from broad slapstick (Wedding Crashers, Fred Claus) and popcorn action flicks (Jack the Giant Slayer, R.I.P.D.), which hardly makes him ready for narrative territory inhabited far better by the likes of John Grisham, Michael Connelly and Scott Turow.

Dobkin shares the writing chores here with scripters Nick Schenk (Gran Torino) and Bill Dubuque, and the result eventually feels overcooked: a high-concept proposal likely sold via a tantalizing 25-word pitch that lacked a solid punch line. Hollywood is littered with the forgotten corpses of such projects: promising at first glance, but ultimately disappointing.

And I’m fairly certain most viewers will be quite unhappy with the way this one ends.

Downey’s Hank Palmer is a slick, big-city defense attorney who makes no apologies for employing every possible legal trick to get his wealthy but clearly guilty clients off the hook. (“They’re the only ones who can afford me.”) Although Hank is troubled by neither scruples nor morals, his surface glad-handing masks an arrogant jerk with a miserable home life shared with a hotsy-totsy younger wife (Sarah Lancaster, in a fleeting and thankless part) poised to divorce him, thus turning their adorable little girl — Emma Tremblay, as Lauren — into a reluctant bargaining chip.

Then, suddenly, a crisis: the death of Hank’s mother, which brings him back to his bucolic (and frankly gorgeous) home town of tiny Carlinville, Ind. (actually Shelburne Falls, Mass.). He abandoned this scene years earlier, no longer able to withstand the belittling treatment from his father, Joseph (Duvall), who happens to be the community’s long-presiding judge.

The reunion is hardly cheerful, despite the obvious bond Hank feels for older brother Glen (Vincent D’Onofrio) and younger brother Dale (Jeremy Strong), both of whom remained in Carlinville.

Hank and his father immediately fall into their old, long-established pattern of mutual contempt and rapacious verbal sniping, much to the chagrin of everybody else. It’s a well-established fact that people, no matter how old they get, often revert to a powerless adolescent dynamic when in the presence of their parents, particularly if the setting is a childhood home.

And if the relationship is long-frayed to begin with, the situation is far worse: The unresolved issues that have been held at bay, in the shelter of the well-established lives we’ve built elsewhere, pop right back to the surface.

Safe House: Grim, fast-paced peril

Safe House (2012) • View trailer
3.5 stars. Rating: R, for strong violence and occasional profanity
By Derrick Bang


Robert Redford read books, seeking clandestine patterns and hidden messages he never expected to find. Ryan Reynolds babysits a high-tech apartment for 12 hours every day, bouncing a tennis ball against empty walls.

After a year of nothing but dull monitor duty, junior CIA operative Matt Weston
(Ryan Reynolds) suddenly gets the call he thinks he's been waiting for: the
order to activate the safe house he has been babysitting. As the old saying goes,
though, be careful what you wish for: You may get it.

Suddenly, inexplicably, both men are on the run: targeted by callously efficient assassins, unable to distinguish good guys from bad guys, unwilling to turn to once-trusted colleagues.

Safe House is Three Days of the Condor for the post-Bourne generation: a sizzling, fast-paced thriller that pits cinema’s beloved man on the run against overwhelming, unknown and frequently confusing odds. And if Reynolds doesn’t quite have Redford’s graceful charm, he more than compensates with frustrated anguish and stubborn determination.

In short, Reynolds’ Matt Weston makes a thoroughly engaging and sympathetic hero: a good guy who deserves far better than the fate into which he has fallen.

David Guggenheim’s script for Safe House includes more than a few echoes of Condor, at times following that 1975 classic’s blueprint a little too close for comfort ... up to and including the cynical postscript. But Guggenheim also spins his plot into some fresh directions, and Swedish director Daniel Espinosa — making a stylish English-language feature debut — utilizes the story’s South African setting with imagination and verve.

Matt, chafing after 12 grindingly dull months playing “housekeeper” to this empty CIA safe house in Cape Town, has one bright spot in his otherwise tedious existence: French girlfriend Ana (Nora Arnezeder), a young doctor in training. But she’s about to accept a post back in Paris, and — try as he might — Matt can’t persuade his friend and case officer back home, David Barlow (Brendan Gleeson), to get a transfer approved by Harlan Whitford (Sam Shepard), the deputy director of operations.

Elsewhere in Cape Town, disgraced CIA field agent Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington), having just obtained some highly valuable intel from a colleague in MI6, finds himself on the run from a squad of killers led by the relentless Vargas (Lebanese actor Fares Fares, nightmarishly credible as a stone-cold killer). Having exhausted all other options, Frost surrenders himself at the American Consulate.

Back in the States, Whitford, Barlow and branch chief Catherine Linklater (Vera Farmiga) are practically giddy with delight; Tobin, once one of the CIA’s best black ops assets, has eluded capture for a decade while aiding splinter cells and trading incendiary secrets to the highest bidder.

Whitford orders the Cape Town safe house activated; Matt is told to expect visitors. A few hours later, Frost is dragged in by field agent Daniel Kiefer (Robert Patrick) and a team of interrogators. The next few moments flirt with the questionable justification of torture, but Espinosa doesn’t dwell on moral ambiguity; within minutes, the safe house is assaulted by Vargas and his men, still after Tobin, and determined to leave no witnesses.

How did they know where to look?

Source Code: Tick ... tick ... tick

Source Code (2011) • View trailer for Source Code
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for dramatic intensity, violence and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.1.11


Some stories are gangbusters on the printed page, but far less successful on the big screen. The mediums are distinct, each with advantages and disadvantages; what can feel elegant, lyrical and intriguing as prose can wind up clumsy, tiresome and contrived as a film. There's no getting around the fact that we imagine certain concepts better in our minds, while reading; being confronted by a visual adaptation in real time winds up less satisfying.

Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) hasn't the faintest idea how he wound up
traveling on this particular train, nor does he understand why Christina
(Michelle Monaghan) flirtatiously chats him up with such familiarity; she's a
complete stranger to him. But she — and everybody else on this Chicago-bound
train — are about to become very important, as Stevens gradually understands
and accepts the responsibility of a most unusual mission.

Source Code is somewhat unsatisfying, which is a shame; Ben Ripley's original screenplay is fascinating — if rather derivative — and director Duncan Jones does his best to minimize its built-in weaknesses.

The premise is classic sci-fi, the setting uneasily contemporary: A man on a Chicago-bound train (Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes with a start from what feels like an unsettling dream. The woman sitting opposite (Michelle Monaghan, as Christina) obviously knows him, and chats animatedly; he hasn't the faintest idea who she is. The routine stuff of travel with a large group of strangers plays out — spilled coffee, punched tickets, impatient and oblivious passengers — while our bewildered protagonist attempts to process his disorientation. They stop once, at an outlying station, then resume their journey.

Minutes later, not far from the city, a massive explosion destroys the entire train, killing everybody on board.

Our hero comes to his senses in what looks like a simulator capsule, now suffering a similar type of dislocation. Gradually, a "handler" communicating via a monitor screen (Vera Farmiga, as Goodwin) talks him back to his own self. Military training takes hold: He's Colter Stevens, apparently participating in some sort of test, or something. Goodwin is vague about details; a fussy scientist type in the background (Jeffrey Wright, as Rutledge) orders her to "send him back."

And poof! Stevens is back on the train, resuming the ride from the same waking point, re-living the same events, although experiencing them differently, because he remembers everything from the first time around. But the outcome is the same: Eight minutes later, the bomb goes off and everybody dies ... at which point, he regains consciousness back in the simulator. Or whatever it really is.

Stevens gradually learns — as do we — that he's part of a military/scientific emergency operation that has been mobilized in the wake of the aforementioned catastrophe. Somebody has blown up the train, whether terrorists or a lone loony, and has threatened to explode an even larger device in the heart of Chicago. Through means we really don't need to obsess about, Stevens' consciousness can be "projected" into one of the train passenger's minds, shortly before the catastrophe, in effect taking over that person's body and soul. Because of the nature of the explosion, deductive logic suggests that the bombmaker is within viewing range of the train, perhaps initially as one of the passengers. Stevens' assignment is to figure out who is responsible, and then convey this information back to HQ, so that the impending larger attack can be stopped.

Up in the Air: Rarefied air

Up in the Air (2009) • View trailer for Up in the Air
4.5 stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity, sensuality and fleeting nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.7.10
Buy Blu-Ray: Up in the Air [Blu-ray]


When Columbia Pictures released The China Syndrome on March 16, 1979, just 12 days before Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island turned fiction into uncomfortable fact, more than a few editorials discussed this unsettling convergence of art and real-world events.

Pure coincidence, of course, given the several years required to get any film from concept to screen. But there's no denying the degree to which The China Syndrome subsequently tapped into the late 1970s Zeitgeist and general paranoia concerning nuclear power plants. Indeed, the film quite probably had far too much influence — to this day — on subsequent political decisions made regarding the nuclear power industry.

After watching Natalie (Anna Kendrick) struggle to maneuver her old-fashioned
suitcase -- which isn't even that large -- Ryan (George Clooney) buys her a
more efficient bag, like his, and brutally instructs her in the "proper" way of
packing. No surprise: She resents this...

Similarly, 1999's American Beauty truly caught the mood of that decade, with screenwriter Alan Ball exploiting his gift for slightly exaggerated truth to denounce our corrupt, overly materialistic and unwholesomely narcissistic society, as viewed with growing clarity by one man doing his best to escape it. Director Sam Mendes' film became the mirror in which we viewed ourselves, as the millennium approached, and the reflection wasn't terribly inspiring.

Art sometimes speaks to us, as a nation, on a level that far exceeds its creators' wildest expectations. It's lightning in a bottle: You can't plan or design it. Coincidence frequently plays a role, as if God — or your supreme being of choice — occasionally likes to look down and go boogah-boogah-boogah.

Jason Reitman's Up in the Air — collaboratively scripted with Sheldon Turner, and adapted from Walter Kirn's novel — is such a stunningly accurate commentary on Where We Are Right Now, that it's positively spooky.

It's not merely a function of putting faces to the down-sizing epidemic that has booted so many people from their jobs, although that's part of the well-seasoned recipe that makes this film so thought-provoking. Far more relevant is this script's savage indictment of the illusion of "contact" that we have via cell phones, e-mail, texting, tweeting and whatever else arrives in the next five minutes: technological substitutes for actual human interaction.

"People don't look each other in the eye much anymore," Reitman comments, in his film's press notes, "and we have fewer relationships."

This is not a good thing.

The phenomenon is all around us, the trend increasingly disturbing. How many friends and family members skipped traditional holiday greeting cards this year, for the "easier" — read: less personal — option of group e-mail?

You won't get any warm fuzzies by hanging the paper print-out of an e-mail over the fireplace.

And here's the limit, at least at our home: We received a card from friends — who grudgingly get points for that much — that had no message inside, beyond a Web address where we could find their "holiday greeting" to all. (Yeah, we'll get right on that.)

But I digress...

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas: Grim bedtime story

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008) • View trailer for The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.20.08
Buy DVD: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas • Buy Blu-Ray: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas [Blu-ray]


Innocence, inevitably, is the first casualty of war.

Children, their hungry and ever-inquisitive minds not yet shaped by hardened reality, experience events — even tragic events – far differently than adults. In Hope and Glory, director John Boorman's 1987 film memoir of his experiences during World War II, his childhood self and friends found great adventure in the rubble of homes bombed during the London blitz.

Having disobeyed strict orders to remain in his own enclosed yard, 8-year-old
Bruno (Asa Butterfield) makes his way through a woodsy area, crosses a stream
and is astonished to find Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a boy his own age, on the far
side of a wicked fence. Try as he might, Bruno cannot fathom the purpose
behind this enclosed "farm," and his quest for answers becomes increasingly
horrifying, as this film moves to its final act.

All those years later, theater audiences briefly found such behavior heartless and horrifying, then realized they were missing the point: Such actions were not disrespectful, but instead represented the resilience of the youthful human soul ... indeed, the hope of future generations. Children — little sponges, all — are the vessels into which we pour our best virtues ... or our most heinous faults.

Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is the child at the heart of director/scripter Mark Herman's eloquent and deeply moving adaptation of novelist John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, yet another intriguing take on the WWII Holocaust. The film is both memorably poignant and tremendously important, as it indicts human ugliness through the insight of the ultimate judge: a young boy's instinctive desire to believe the best of his father.

I recall mentioning, earlier this year in a review of The Counterfeiter, how fascinating it is, at this late date, that dramatists continue to find fresh insight — indeed, as-yet unexplored actual events — in a subject and time period that one would have thought exhausted decades ago. And now it's happening again: As 2008 draws to a close, we're getting not just one but two new sagas of Nazi horror: this fictitious parable by Boyne, and the fact-based Defiance, certain to show a far different side of star Daniel Craig, currently basking in the limelight as James Bond.

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. Great drama springs not from how we react during our workaday lives, but how we rise — or fall — to the challenge of a soul-numbing crisis. And although world events continue to provide fresh atrocities that one day will inspire their own body of drama — Darfur and Guantanamo Bay come to mind — precious little can match the Holocaust for its depiction of humanity at its most evil, on the one side, and resiliently courageous, on the other.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas begins in Berlin, in the deliberately vague early 1940s, as 8-year-old Bruno learns that his family will be moving to the countryside. The relocation is prompted by his father's military career; although sympathetic about the friends his son will leave behind, the man (David Thewlis) gently explains that a soldier must respond to the call of duty.

Bruno's equally dutiful mother (Vera Farmiga) seems complacently content with this; Bruno's 12-year-old sister, Gretel (Amber Beattie), recognizing her role is to set a good example for her younger brother, smiles bravely.

We wonder, idly, precisely what sort of "soldier" Bruno's father is. We don't wonder very long.