From the Archives: The Brothers Solomon

From the pre-Talking Movies archives.

When their beloved father goes into a coma socially inept brothers John (Will Arnett) and Dean Solomon (Will Forte) try to give him something to live for by providing a grandchild. However when their dating skills prove non-existent they turn to a surrogate mother Janine (Kristen Wiig) with a jealous ex (Chi McBride)

Will Forte is not Will Ferrell, but he probably thinks he is, they both worked on Saturday Night Live after all. Like the painfully unfunny film appearances of SNL star Molly Shannon (Year of the Dog anyone?) Will Forte proves that not everyone on SNL should be encouraged to traipse over to Hollywood. He wrote this film as well as co-starring in it so the blame for the deplorable lack of comedy can be placed firmly on his shoulders. The idea that being able to make sketch comedy, which relies on beating a joke around for 3 minutes till you’ve exhausted it, qualifies you to make films where you have to construct a 90 minute story with organically occurring jokes is a puzzling one. If you can hop up the stairs a couple of steps at a time it doesn’t mean you should suddenly run out and take up pole-vaulting.

The idea of making fun of two social misfits instantly recalls Dumb and Dumber but this is even more suspect and mean-spirited and at least that had some hilarious gags, before the Farrelly Brothers lost their funny bones. There are some funny moments. Chi McBride’s first appearance is comic and menacing at the same time as he takes umbrage wherever he can find it, accusing the whole world of being racist when it’s not. Could this have gone somewhere? Yeah, but a sketch show writer…oh forget it. There’s an incredibly uncomfortable sequence which features the brothers trying to prepare for parenthood by observing children at the playground and offering them ice-cream. Hmmm. There’s also an outrageous gag at an adoption agency involving a misunderstanding about a photo which provides Will Arnett with the best line of the whole movie.

Will Arnett (beloved as Gob on Arrested Development) can work wonders with weak material, as Blades of Glory showed, but this script defeats even him. Things get so tedious after a while that you start playing spot the TV actor. Oh look, there’s Jenna Fischer from the American Office in a cameo, hey, that’s depressed old Ted from Scrubs, and who’s the surrogate mother, why it’s a look-alike of Sarah Paulson from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The face that should occasion panic is Heartbreak Kid and The Invasion star Malin Akerman, a cinematic hoodoo this year. The sky banner that goes on forever and has the entire cast of supporting characters reading it is the highlight of the whole film. It is actually hilarious and worth seeing but as Dr Johnson once said: worth seeing, yes, but it’s not worth going to see.

1/5

From the Archives: The Invasion

From the pre-Talking Movies archives.

A NASA shuttle disintegrates on re-entry transmitting a deadly alien virus which removes people’s emotions. Can Claire (Nicole Kidman) keep her son safe from her infected ex-husband while a doctor (Daniel Craig) seeks to find a cure?

“And how many times must a film be remade, before it can be remade no more?” Bob Dylan didn’t say that but he didn’t have to sit through this baffling mess. The Invasion is archly titled to hide the fact that it is the third (!) remake of 1956 B-movie classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Directed by Don Siegel the original was a master-class of forced economy as he eschewed effects, instead creating an atmosphere of creeping unease and paranoia as the truth emerged. Siegel’s film was a political metaphor so effective it could chill the blood whether you regarded it as allegorical of McCarthyism or Communism. The original “pod-people” were polite…but a bit off, as Stephen King noted, they had no community spirit. By contrast the pod people in this film are all about community, they have no emotions but only because they seem to have achieved a blissful state of nirvana. But that’s not the first change to be noted.

The creeping unease and subtle exposition of Siegel’s version has been thrown out and replaced by an indecent haste to cut to the chase, which ironically makes the film less exciting as there’s no escalating paranoia. At points it looks like The Invasion was originally meant to be an intensely first person narrative from Nicole Kidman’s point of view with the presence of the pod people on the streets becoming ever more obvious and menacing. Sadly such subtlety, if that was the original intention, has been lost in the welter of changes made to Oliver Hirschbiegel’s original cut by the Wachowksi brothers. The constant jumpy cutting though betrays the heavy hand of studio executives as Hirschbiegel’s Downfall was replete with extended tracking shots while the Wachowkis have an elegance in visual storytelling entirely absent here.

Who knows who wrote what but it’s a safe bet the hilarious political message comes from the terminally confused Wachowski brothers whose V for Vendetta can easily be read as a paen to neo-conservatism if one was so michievously inclined….Here the pod people confront Nicole Kidman with the world they offer: no wars, no poverty, no rape, no murder, no exploitation of others because there are no others, we are all one. She promptly shoots them dead….as you begin scratching your head trying to figure out what on earth the film is trying to say. News reports show us Bush and Chavez signing trade agreements, the US occupation in Iraq coming to a joyous end, and generally world peace is breaking out all over. All of which will end if Daniel Craig’s doctor can find a cure for the alien virus. Craig gives the best performance but by the end even he looks defeated by the film’s logic…

1/5

From the Archives: 27 Dresses

The second deep dive into the pre-Talking Movies archives finds a review which gets quite thoroughly side-tracked by James Marsden.

This film is meant to be about perennial bridesmaid Jane Nichols in her quest to finally be the one walking up the aisle at her 28^th wedding. Katherine Heigl though is, surprisingly, too bland in the lead to hold our attention so it should really be titled Everything Goes Right for James Marsden. If you’ve been following the career of poor Marsden you will have seen him lose the girl to Wolverine and Superman and get stitched up royally by Lena Headey in Gossip. 2007 represented something of a breakthrough for Marsden as he managed to at least not get screwed over in Hairspray before in Enchanted he finally got a girl…not the girl admittedly, but still it was one more girl than he’d managed to get up to that point. Now finally Marsden appears in a film where the script’s structure makes it clear that, barring genre-bending catastrophes, he has to get the girl.

27 Dresses won’t change the world of romantic comedies but it lacks any bite whatever. Marsden, a cynical reporter stuck in a hellish job writing romantic froth about society weddings, meets lovelorn PA Jane. They, of course, don’t get on. He steals her appointments book to check his hunch that she’s a wedding junkie and so writes a story about her 27 weddings as bridesmaid/fixer. Aline Brosh McKenna, the screenwriter of The Devil Wears Prada, disappointingly forgets to bring any of that film’s acerbity to this script. Judy Greer does her best to have some fun with her role as Jane’s best friend, traditionally the role in romantic comedies that actors enjoy playing the most, but her bitchy lines aren’t a patch on Emily Blunt’s equivalent repartee in Prada. Sadly this film just lacks any pizzazz. Marsden who romped his way through Enchanted is having noticeably less of a good time here.

Perhaps he’s subdued by the presence of Malina Akerman as Jane’s obnoxious sister, who immediately snares Jane’s boss (Edward Burns-sleepwalking his way towards his paycheque) and asks Jane to be her bridesmaid and plan their wedding, ending all hope of Jane finally consummating her unrequited love for him. Akerman has appeared in some of the worst films of the past year, The Invasion, The Brothers Solomon, and The Heartbreak Kid and has one of the most grating screen presences imaginable. Theoretically pretty in a square jawed blonde sort of way she just lacks any sort of charm to make an audience care about her character’s various humiliations in this film, actually we cheer them on! Marsden is having some fun but 27 Dresses is just curiously anaemic as a romantic comedy. The funniest sequences involve montages of Heigl at various weddings which set up the closing visual gag which is sweet and funny but this is really one for Marsden completists only.

2/5

War for the Planet of the Apes 3-D

Andy Serkis, via motion capture, returns one last time for more monkey business as Caesar, the Moses of intelligent apes.

Caesar is in the woods, with his apes, and just wants to be left alone; to brood over his murder of rival Koba (Toby Kebbell), and raise his new young son. But not only have Koba’s followers started to collaborate with the humans against Caesar in order to avenge his death, the humans have also become menacingly organised under a new leader, the Colonel (Woody Harrelson). An early bloody skirmish is followed by a night raid with the Colonel himself attempting to terminate Caesar’s command, with extreme prejudice. Caesar abdicates his duties as leader, vowing revenge. While the apes set out for the promised land beyond the desert, Caesar, with trusted lieutenant Maurice the orangutan (Karin Konoval), and two gorilla bodyguards, sets out to assassinate the Colonel. But matters are complicated by a new mutation of the virus assailing humanity.

War for the Planet of the Apes would be more accurately titled Commando Raids for the Planet of the Apes. Indeed a large portion of the movie is Prison Break for the Planet of the Apes, cycling back to the pivotal sequence of 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes where super-intelligent Caesar was incarcerated with regular chimpanzees – because he chewed off a man’s fingers for being rude. Blake Snyder’s ‘Save the Cat’ does not advocate having your hero chew off a man’s fingers for being rude to elicit audience sympathy, quite the opposite really. Yet we are expected to automatically root for Caesar through three films progressively less interested in human characters. If one could call the ciphers in this franchise human. This is surely the worst written trilogy this decade, and logically so; if an audience accepts ciphers, why bother sweating writing characters? If an audience accepts Gary Oldman’s noble sacrifice to save humanity resulting in nothing, why bother even setting up protagonist and antagonist humans? Woody Harrelson’s Colonel McCullough is the only articulate human, and even Harrelson can’t excel with this straw man antagonist. Hard to credit this franchise was spawned by Rod Serling’s mischievous screenplay.

Rupert Wyatt in Rise, and Matt Reeves in Dawn, both threw in striking sequences of directorial bravura to try and paper over the poor scripting. But here, there is nothing going on in that department, which is a tremendous surprise given that Reeves returns as director. Where are his visual trademarks – the lengthy tracking shots following chaos exploding into frame, the fixed-position sequences, the Hitchcockian visual suspense? This is all the more surprising given the unsubtle references to the visually extravagant Apocalypse Now: slogans daubed everywhere, a shaven-headed Colonel expounding on history, culture and morality, a mission to exterminate (‘The only good Kong is a dead Kong’), Jimi Hendrix, and, just in case you didn’t get it, ‘Ape-pocalypse Now’ graffiti. It’s as if Reeves has just given up, going through the motions in a permanently 3-D darkened landscape of snow and concrete that renders things verily sepia-vision. Steve Zahn as a nebbish ape is a highlight, mostly because, when dressed akin to Bob Balaban’s Moonrise Kingdom narrator, he appears to have wandered in from Wes Anderson’s Planet of the Apes; the idea of which is more entertaining than this tedious movie, dragged out by its insistence on ape sign language.

The powerful and emotive finale is unintentionally hilarious when you realise just how literal the Caesar as Moses motif is being taken, but it’s just one final plodding mis-step. Caesar blows up the Colonel’s base and yet escapes the fiery blastwave because it is all-encompassing but apparently all to one side just to avoid enveloping him, Caesar’s final confrontation with the Colonel sees him extend a character redeeming mercy that looks uncannily like the height of cruelty, and the new mutation of the virus, which reduces humans to mute amiable simpletons, leads us seamlessly into the world of the Charlton Heston classic. So, we are required to cheer for the devolution of the human race into mute amiable simpletons, and yet that isn’t presented as a somewhat challenging proposition when even 2008’s disastrous The Invasion noted the paradox of rooting for free will at the cost of world peace. To reference another 1979 film that’s been in the air this summer Caesar’s story involves us losing the ability to produce another Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, Louis Armstrong, Ingmar Bergman, Gustave Flaubert, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Paul Cezanne or even understand who they were or appreciate what they did. Hail, Caesar?

0.5/5

Diana

Downfall Director Oliver Hirschbiegel reminds us he also directed The Invasion as he once again comes a cropper working with a famous blonde Australian actress.

Diana opens with Naomi Watts’ Sloane Ranger getting into the elevator which will take her to a fatal chase thru a Parisian tunnel. It then jumps back two years to late 1995 with the unsettled Princess preparing for her ‘Queen of Hearts’ TV interview with Martin Bashir, and assiduously hiding this from her adviser Patrick (Charles Edwards). Diana, as she complains to her acupuncturist/psychiatrist Una (Geraldine James), is feeling detached from her children (by Palace meddling only co-ordinating their schedules monthly), hounded by the paparazzi, and generally unloved. When Una’s husband is hospitalised Diana rushes to visit, and falls for Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan (Naveen Andrews). But though she visits his family in Pakistan to ask for their blessing can she really marry a workaholic who insists privacy is vital to maintain the concentration he needs as a surgeon?

This, unlike The Invasion, feels like a Hirschbiegel movie. Bookended by showy (and ultimately pointless) tracking shots, his camera roves constantly. But this style and Rainer Klausmann’s narrowly focused cinematography is brought to bear on Stephen Jeffrey’s stilted script. Despite being based on the allegedly true behind the scenes story, you never believe for a second this really happened. Dialogue like Hasnat’s “You don’t perform the operation, the operation performs you” should have been laughed out of the room at the read-thru stage, yet it remains; inciting unintentional hilarity. The longer the movie drags on the more it feels like a Mark Millar comic: history is a cover story, what we know about Diana’s romance with Dodi Al-Fayed was just an elaborate smokescreen created by her, in collusion with a favoured paparazzo, as part of her true romance with Hasnat.

Diana feels tediously endless because talented people are failing to achieve any insight. Watts’ head is pleasingly always tilted at an angle, but she and Andrews can’t make their characters escape the bad 1980s soap opera feel of their secret romance. Every one of their arguments is the same argument, rather like The X-Files: I Want to Believe, and so no dramatic momentum ever builds. The portrayal of Diana’s persona is just too much – especially as this is meant to reveal the woman behind the facade. A scene with a tearful blind man in Rimini joyously touching her face is the nadir: Diana as Jesus meets Obi-Wan Kenobi, power going out from her to console. Diana uses her children as an arguing gambit with Hasnat, but rarely seems to think of them otherwise; her full personality thus remains a mystery.

If you don’t believe that everyone in England was watching the Bashir interview, with entire pubs eschewing watching football or drinking for it, then Diana is not for you…

1.5/5