Well, I was hoping to be able to say that this would join the short list of my favorite fútbol movies, but as engaging as García Bernal and Luna are as the titular hermanos, the storytelling by writer-director Carlos Cuarón is rote and unsurprising.
Highlight is García Bernal's Cursi in a comically bad Spanish-language music video of Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me."
Speaking as someone who knew so little about A Chorus Line that I would have said it was by Bob Fosse if anyone had asked, let me just say that even if this were just a metamovie about casting the 2006 Broadway revival of the show, it would be terrific.
What makes it even better than that is that it is in part sort of a biography of the show, going back to the 100 hours of reel-to-reel tape Michael Bennett recorded with friends and fellow denizens of the musical stage, then molded into the multiple Tony winner. The result, including the presence of two of those denizens, Baayork Lee and Donna McKechnie, who played not-at-all-disguised versions of themselves when the show opened in 1976, so enlivens the underlying text that I might (might) actually be interested in seeing it, and I haven't had any interest in seeing a stage musical not directed by my daughter since Hedwig and the Angry Inch was on Jane Street.
Just a day in the life of a provincial Philippines family-run movie theater (whose marquee even says FAMILY) that shows heterosexual porn as a backdrop to gay prostitution. Not much happens: the matriarch's legal action against her philandering husband is decided, an affair is revealed, a pregnancy is announced, a boil is popped, and a stray goat interrupts the evening show. Don't ask me why I found it compelling; I just did.
Well, this is a funny little bird. Tortuous plot, tortuous mood, and with all the twists it's bound to take a wrong turn from time to time. At points it tiptoes along the quirky-for-quirk's-sake border, but a smart script by Stephen Belber (who also directed) and the unfailing charm of Steve Zahn and Jennifer Aniston keep us in the game, sometimes against our better judgment, and almost always against our sense of logic. As Aniston's character, Sue, says at one point, "That's not how life works." Your point being?
Huh! Who'd have thought I could be convinced that Mike Tyson is a complex, thoughtful, self-critical man motivated more than anything else by childhood fear of being bullied? In multiple interviews Tyson rarely blames anyone else for his multiple meltdowns, and the vigor with which he examines his life must certainly make it worth living, regardless of what most of us may have assumed. Oh, and the fight footage does nothing to undercut his assertion that at his peak, he was the best ever to wear Everlast trunks.
You know what word I haven't used much lately? Fun. Well, this is a whole year's worth of adrenalinic, self-referential, mind-warping fun. I'm no Trekkie (or whatever it is that they prefer to be called), but I'm aware enough of the tropes of the original series to get at least the most obvious jokes about what Jennie Tonic calls Star Trek Babies. And I'm a humanist, not a physicist, but I guess I get enough of the weird pseudoscience to sort of get the time-warp. And I've sure as hell seen enough Indy Jones and Star Wars flicks to appreciate the adrenaline rush. All of which equals fun.
Alternate reality: credited as a concept artist (whatever that is) is one Ryan Church, which is the name of one of my favorite New York Mets. Now, I have a compulsion to give esoteric nicknames to my Mets, and when Church joined the team, I immediately translated his surname to the Scots and Middle English version of the word, which led naturally to . . . right: Captain Kirk.
Mr. Scott admitted that before working on the movie — a retelling of John Godey’s best-selling New York City subway hostage thriller, made into a classic 1974 movie — he had never been in the subway. “Well, when I say never, I mean maybe once or twice quite drunk at night, when I couldn’t find a taxi,” said Mr. Scott, who was born in England and lives in Los Angeles. [posted 3 May]
Public Enemies (4+)Ball Don't LieThe centerpiece of this astonishing film about Bobby Sands and the other IRA hunger strikers of 1981--after we see the prisoners' excretory protests, before we see the grotesque mechanics of the starving body's attack against itself--is a long, maybe 15-minute, scene at a table of an otherwise empty dining hall, as Sands and his parish priest debate the religious, ethical, and political rightness of the upcoming strike. Sounds as undramatic as can be, right? Two guys talking, My Cigarette with Bobby. But in context it is more dramatic, I suspect, than anything the X-Men or Star Trek movies have for us, as both men fight for both men's souls.
One of the best films I can hope to see this year.
Anytime Robert Downey Jr. is in a film and you come out talking about someone else, that someone else has done something pretty spectacular; so with Jamie Foxx here.
I've sometimes said that the Oscar-darling "afflicted guy" often isn't as challenging as a character more in the range of what we see in everyday life. Well, there's nothing simple about this afflicted-guy performance; Foxx's Nathaniel Ayers makes us uneasy throughout, always as uncertain of what he'll do next as those in his life must be. Not a great film, but a great performance.
By the way, the trailer does not prepare you for the hell of LA homelessness that the film portrays; apparently the producers were afraid that that would be too big a downer. Instead, the trailer emphasizes the uplift that is indeed a keynote of the film, but not the only one.
