Movie Reviews

Talladega Nights, when it all comes down to it, is nothing more than one big, 105 minute long joke.  Really all it is is Will Ferrell sending up the Red-Neck and running around like an crazy person who thinks he’s on fire.  It’s just a good thing that with Ferrell and his Anchorman helmer, Adam McKay behind him, they stretch out the joke without mercy and make it laughable the entire time with surprising ease.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
4 Stars

Will Ferrell is the head honcho comedian in Hollywood today.  Sure, Jim Carrey is as zany as ever, but it’s been years since he’s put out a comedy that wasn’t brought down by a boring script or director.  And Adam Sandler regularly puts out a $100 million dollar picture, but they sort of blow hard.  Ferrell, on the other hand, has captured and even helped to create today’s humor, pushing pompous and outrageous jerks to the foreground, while busting many a gut in teenagers across the country.  Whether they’re watching DVDs of Anchorman or watching reruns of SNL, Ferrell’s leading the industry.

And Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby only helps to cement his position in Hollywood.  It may be dumb, it might not have dilemmas that force you to question everything about your life; but it’s funny.  It’s damn funny.  Ferrell, co-stars Gary Cole and John C. Reilly, and Adam McKay nail the sense of humor found in Anchorman to a disturbing degree.

Ferrell is the film’s namesake, a man who grew up shouting “I wanna go fast!” about as often as he breathed.  But with some words of wisdom from his dead-beat dad (Cole), Bobby gets the determination to drive faster than anyone else, eventually breaching the top ranks of NASCAR.  Once there, he gladly takes his self-appointed title as the best person ever.  He brags and assumes greatness, but at the same time is kind and well-meaning enough to be lovable and able to sympathize with.  He really does believe he’s the best and the brightest of his kind, until the king of the French Racing circuit (Sacha Baron Cohen) comes along and tries to steal his glory.

Ferrell and Cohen exaggerate their characters to colossal degrees, but do so with success.  Ferrell, on one hand, thinks America is the best country in the world, loves Jesus and names his kids Walker and Texas Ranger.  If George W. Bush were a NASCAR racer, he might be Ricky Bobby.  Cohen takes his Euro trash character and exploits every stereotype ever made, not only giving him a French accent that sounds like his tongue has swelled to twice its size, but also making him flamboyantly, outrageously and literally gay.  Some may mistake this for homophobia, but plain simple all it is is taking every preconception we’ve had about the French and saying, “What if all of that was real?”

The clashing characters combine to give Talladega Nights a satirical take on U.S. relations with Europe in this era of a Struggle Against Extremism.  It takes our idea of the French and their idea of us; and if we’re really this stupid, who can blame them for hating us?  And if the French are really that gay, how can we not laugh at them?  It’s a pleasant undertone that emerges, likely by accident, that helps to add intelligence to a movie centers on idiots.  But in the end, it’s the humor that makes Talladega Nights what it is, not antics a la Dr. Strangelove.

Talladega Nights isn’t anything if it isn’t funny, pushing jokes that work every minute and more.  It’s not just laugh-out-loud funny, it’s I-hope-I-don’t- accidentally-spit-on-everyone-else-in-the-theater funny.  It might not be touching like Little Miss Sunshine, but it’s not that kind of movie: it’s a stupid comedy.  And if stupid comedies work can work this well, than it must be good to be stupid.

Robin Williams goes crazy creepy stalker guy on a kid and a blind woman…and he’s the normal one.  The Night Listener never quite achieves its goals.  Still there’s some interesting parts, performances, and mysteries that might be worth a look if you’re a fan of thrillers.  I can’t quite recommend it, but I won’t tell you to stay away.

The Night Listener
2 & 1/2 Stars

The greatest flaw in The Night Listener is how it blows a good setup and, in the end, never becomes the film it desires to be, or could have been.  But where most thrillers these days are blood n’ guts slasher films, it is nice to see a psychological thriller, even if it goes off the deep end.

Gabriel Noone (Robin Williams) is a famous radio personality whose world is crumbling around him.  His lover Jess (Bobby Cannavale) has moved out, tired of having their relationship mined for fodder on Gabriel’s show.  It’s at this point Gabriel’s agent gives him a manuscript to read by a dying young boy named Pete (Rory Culkin).

Pete’s story tells of his molestation by the hands of his parents and their friends (complete with creepy, and totally unnecesary, flashbacks shown in dark grainy footage).  After reading the manuscript and learning of Pete’s poor health Gabriel begins a telephone relationship with Pete and Donna (Toni Collette), the woman who takes care of him.

As weeks go by small inconsistencies and questions about Pete and Donna begin to fester in Gabriel’s mind and he begins to wonder if he is the victim of a hoax.  Unable to let it go, Gabriel begins a journey to find if Pete and Donna are real.  What he finds are more questions than answers.

The film has a good set-up but no real sense of realization, resolution, or completion.  Once Gabriel’s travels begin, the story takes a sharp left-turn into crazywackofunland.  He starts behaving erratically and engaging in behavior that defies the logic and sense of the man from the first half of the film.

The movie continues to tease us with the identity and reality of Pete, and presents several suggestions for Donna’s behavior.  However, halfway through the film you realize the writers have no idea how to make the mystery pay-off for the audience.

A final note for those of you going to see this film.  There’s a strange epilogue tacked on to the end that gives away the truth of the story.  Besides being incredibly lame, it destroys the only real thing the film had going for it – the mystery of Pete.  I’d suggest you leave as Gabriel is summing up the story on the radio, unless you want to be severely disappointed.

There are several interesting bits here but they aren’t put together well enough for me to recommend the film to you.  You just have this feeling if the film had been put in the hands of a more experienced director or had gotten the necessary rewrites it could have been much more than just a mild curiosity.

Style in a film is a very fine issue.  On one hand, it always helps to throw in some sparkle to keep the viewer’s attention, plus there’s the whole trying to add artistic merit issue.  But on the other hand, too much of a different feel in a film can alienate a viewer.  Unfortunately, Miami Vice isn’t just the latter, but the director takes it so far that it’s like a spit in the face of storytelling.

Miami Vice
1 & 1/2 Stars

I really wanted to like Miami Vice.  I was the only person in the realm of film critics that I knew who didn’t think it looked like a stinker.  I like Writer/Director Michael Mann, and I like that he took an approach with Miami Vice that few other directors would have the balls to, let alone the creativity.  But after both of the films hours (with change), it’ll wash over you how boring and ungripping the movie is.

The New Don Johnson?

Miami Vice‘s story is easy enough to understand on paper: Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx are detectives narcing it up in Central America hoping to catch a Drug Lord that killed some co-workers.  But on the case Farrell’s character falls for the enemy’s assistant (Gong Li.) 

Only it doesn’t come out that easily in the film.  The actors linger uneasily in the shots as they spew dialogue without any real verbalization, just dropping the lines.  It’s not a sign of bad acting, the characters are just too point-blank to carry any emotion in what few words they say; and because of that it’s difficult to tell what those words falling out of their mouths mean 90% of the time.

Another problem with this innate lack of feeling in the dialogue is the extreme difficulty it presents of relating to any of the characters.  I’m no man of publications such as US Weekly or OK!, But I can honestly say I care more about what the tabloids write-up on Farrell and Foxx than these characters.  Mann’s script just never decides to take a chunk out of character development, or even character creation.

Instead of delivering a fully-developed script, Mann decides instead to go for a visual flair that easily makes more of an impact on the final product than the any of the actors or the story.  But for what it’s worth, it’s damn cool. 

Mann used simplistic, hand-held digital cameras that give off more grain than Farrell’s unshaven face in the movie.  That, in addition to the shaky camera movement, make the film seem more authentic and believable, like just maybe that isn’t actually Jamie Foxx, it’s a real-life cop doing his real-life job on the real-life streets.  I don’t normally like the now-popular technique of shaky camera movement (enough of it on a big screen can upset by stomach,) but it’s used about as well as possible by Mann in Miami Vice.

The only problem is, the cinematography is too cool.  It’s like those iPod commercials: watching a black silhouette groove to the beat over a cornucopia of colors is a great way to spend 30 seconds, but if you had to watch it for over two hours it would become daunting.  The same goes for Miami Vice, the look is just too much and too different to allow the viewers to appreciate anything else in the film.

There are a couple of intense action sequences, and Mann should be commended for trying to do something different; but in the end Miami Vice is just grade-A style vomitted beyond appreciation over a few reels of film.  Too much of a good thing isn’t good.

A mockumentary about a band where the lead singer and lead guitarist are conjoined twins?  Not your average summer movie fare.  Despite its length and freakish unseemliness, there’s something there.  I didn’t exactly enjoy the film, but it hooked me on how it well was put together and made.  For fans of film, or just unusual types far off the mainstream, this flick might be just up your alley.  It’s a bizarrely fascinating story.

Brothers of the Head
3 Stars

Brothers of the Head is a different film.  It’s not something you actually enjoy, though it has many moments, performances, and aspects you can appreciate.  It’s hard to watch, but it’s so well made and so distinctly different it’s worth a look for those willing to take a chance on something this…different.

Not exactly Spinal Tap

A pair of conjoined twins (Harry Treadaway, Luke Treadaway) are found by a promoter with a dream of putting the pair in a rock band.  After months of training the group is put on stage and finds an audience with their punk rock sound and freakshow look.

The film is presented as a documentary taking place in present time with older actors playing roles of band members and managers.  Mixed with these are interviews with the author of their story Brian Aldiss (whose novel is the inspiration for the film), archival footage from the mid-1970’s including rehersals, fights, and tender moments, and scenes from a pathetically awful Hollywood film version of their story.

What’s most interesting is how seriously the film takes it’s subject and how well it disguises itself as a real documentary.  It comes off as so real that you find yourself wondering if there’s not some hiddent truth somewhere in these frames.  The music of the period, the look of the “archival footage,” and the casting of actors who so resemble their younger/older selves you’ll wonder what kind of film tricks were used. 

The best casting is for the role of Laura, the woman who came between the brothers and crashed the world down around them.  Tania Emery plays the younger version of Laura and Diane Kent plays Laura during present time.  It’s eerie how alike they seem.

The film does play heavily on the freakishness of the conjoined twins at at times is hard to watch.  Also there are points were the film seems to devolve into voyeurism.  That and the length (the story could have easily played out in a 45-60 minute short film) will leave you squirming.

It’s too long, it’s creepy, it’s uncomfortable, it’s bizarre, and yet…  In much the same way the film’s characters exploit the “can’t look away” freakishness of the pair, the film has takes advantage of a story that is so different by surrounding the world with good performances and excellent casting and behind the scenes moves to create something uniquely original.  In terms of look and style there’s much to appreciate for fans who enjoy studying films and how they are put togehter.  In terms of an enjoyable film expereince, it’s nowhere near as successful.  I’m modesly recommending it for the former, though if you’re looking for the later I’d suggest seeing whatever is playing in the adjoining theater.