Hooray for Hollywood: RULES DON'T APPLY

Rules Don’t Apply is an old-school Hollywood movie with throwback Hollywood pleasures. But it’s also unusual enough it's never quite the movie you think you’d get. It starts in the early 60s at the bottom of the business, with two fresh-faced young people ready to make a go of careers in showbiz. There’s a meek but determined chauffer for the Howard Hughes companies (Alden Ehrenreich) who hopes to one day actually meet the man and propose a real estate venture. There’s a comely chaste Christian beauty queen (Lily Collins) invited to L.A. to be under contract, put up in a fancy bungalow, and given a salary of $400 a month while awaiting a screen test. They’re each just one of many such people in the Hughes universe, drivers and ingénues kept waiting for a day he may need them, underlings getting by despite the rules and stipulations that come with their paychecks. Of course these two sweet young people start making eyes at each other, progress to light flirting, and eventually might even fall into something like unspoken love underneath their contract’s strict no-fraternization policy. The setup is there for a frothy farce, a gentle rom-com, but it keeps getting crashed into, stirred up, distracted and diverted by the mad man running the show.

That’s the movie’s appeal, a handsome period piece comedy steered by the choppy, unpredictable whims of its outsized supporting player. Hughes, the eccentric billionaire, is by this time of his life retreating into isolation and madness. He’s a figure of mystery, star-power held at first off screen, then hiding in dark rooms or barking orders over the phone. When he’s not around, his power and influence dominates nonetheless. It’s fitting, then, that Warren Beatty, one of Hollywood’s most famous leading men once upon a time, plays him. Now 79, the multi-hyphenate behind Reds and Dick Tracy hasn’t appeared on screen in 15 years, a long absence for someone of his stature, so his impeccably delayed arrival mirrors Hughes’ reclusiveness. When he finally does appear, stuttering, drifting off topic, lost in his own thoughts, giving in to his eccentricities, we can feel the sense of his fading glory by seeing Beatty play up how little cool he brings to the part. He still has charisma, but he funnels it into a figure who is losing his, and who maintains it through wealthy and mystery. He has a great Movie Star entrance, but soon commands the screen by being both more and less than you’d think.

Beatty, who also wrote and directed this passion project (his first behind-the-camera work in nearly 20 years), uses himself sparingly. He lets the picture sit squarely with the youngsters who are struggling to get ahead by using Hughes’ erratic largess and ignoring or indulging his inconsistent follow-through. This fizzy youthful possibility simmering as sublimated romantic interest powers the movie’s rushing sensation of lives out of control. Hughes is desperately trying to hang on to his business interests as investors cast doubts on his ability to manage his assets while an odd, stubborn recluse. He wants control – an idea that extends from his particular instructions about every aspect of his life, down to the behaviors of his underlings – even to the point of changing his mind simply because he can. (Or because he makes so many frivolous micromanaged decisions he can hardly keep track of them all.) It’s a tremendous part Beatty’s written for himself – simultaneously fumbling with befuddled humor and carrying a constant underlying gloom – which is all the more effective for occupying the unusual position of driving the plot while staying on the margins.

Clearly wrestled into submission, the just-over-two-hours final picture has four credited editors and a brisk pace, rocketing through scenes and developments with a quick chop-chop-chop attitude. A host of great actors (Martin Sheen, Matthew Broderick, Candice Bergen, Annette Benning, Haley Bennett, Megan Hilty, Paul Schneider, Taissa Farmiga, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Oliver Platt, Alec Baldwin, and many more) waltzes through small roles, clearly enjoying chewing meaty material in fun scenes. None stay long, but all add immeasurably to the texture and personality of the worlds in which our leads swim. (The ensemble is so stuffed, the performers must’ve shown up at the mere call to be in Beatty movie. Or maybe they all had larger roles in earlier cuts.) The zippy speed feeds the fast pace of life lived according to an unpredictable boss, and the rushing energy of young people trying not to be in love. The pair at the film’s center do, after all, seem perfect for each other. They’re cute – Collins with young Hollywood’s most expressive eyebrows, while Ehrenreich is blessed with one of his generation’s most sympathetic half-squints – trading rat-a-tat dialogue with screwball aplomb.

As the mechanics of the plot send the young nearly-lovers together and then apart, into their own personal setbacks while chasing diverging goals and unsettled futures, there’s a tinge of melancholy that settles over Caleb Deschanel’s warm cinematography. Hughes, too, serves as a funhouse mirror reflecting and refracting (in addition to compounding) their problems. Here’s a man who turned his father’s company into a global success, and still feels empty inside, trying to fill futile days with pretty women to ogle, underlings to boss around, and technology to futz with. (There’s a pretty terrific reaction shot of a speaker, dryly funny as an emphasis of loneliness when one character’s over-the-phone revelation is met with icy silence.) Beatty knows how to get the tragicomic mixture in exactly the right proportions, and the film’s paradoxical frantic meandering settles into a lovely rhythm of dramatic and comedic incidents, big laughs that can get swiftly choked off in a poignant pause. It’s as spirited on the surface as it is sad and reflective underneath even the bubbliest moments. It’s a big glossy movie working in the spirit of a small scrappy one.

Head-On: CONCUSSION

Ironically, for a movie intending to raise awareness for the dangers of football-related brain injuries, Concussion proceeds to beat the audience over the head with the trauma. We see montages of hard hits, often with jocular sportscasters’ commentary and ominous medical slides and scans, thudding horrified score sawing away underneath. There’s no doubt football is a dangerous sport, and the NFL, clinging to a lucrative and popular business model that makes a lot of people very wealthy, has done all it can to downplay, deny, and intimidate anyone who’d raise serious questions about long-term health effects. The movie includes harrowing scenes of several former football players succumbing to mental stresses of one kind or another: rage, severe depression, self-harm, and suicide. It’s a scandal and an outrage that the corporation minting money off of their physical strain continues to ignore, obfuscate, and abdicate any responsibility for this strenuous work.

It’s nothing you couldn’t read about in any number of places – The New York Times, Sport’s Illustrated, GQ, and so on – but Concussion does what only a Hollywood production can to signal boost the important information. The resulting film has good intentions, carrying a message with moral outrage, but does so with a narrative muddled and grey. It tells the story of Dr. Bennett Omalu, the man whose research led to the discovery and diagnosis of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). It’s a rare brain disorder disproportionately affecting professional football players, brought on by long-term and repeated concussions which leave those afflicted with brain damage causing all manner of psychological and mental problems, contributing to untimely deaths. Omalu, an optimistic, hard-working Nigerian immigrant with several medical degrees working as a coroner in Pittsburgh, is presented as a man who simply did the right thing by reporting what he discovers. He can think of no more American thing to do, and is sad to discover an organization out to discredit him because of it.

Omalu, played by Will Smith with a gentle accent, is presented as an outsider capable of seeing the game for the violence and strain that it causes on the human body because he has no stake in the game itself. We see a team doctor (Alec Baldwin), NFL officials (Luke Wilson, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Hill Harper), and even medical professionals who are simply huge football fans (Mike O’Malley) who bristle at the idea that anything could be wrong with these players, especially if that problem arises from their sport. Evidence mounts, and it becomes harder to deny. Helpful supporters are targeted for intimidation, like Omalu’s kind but tough boss (Albert Brooks), while the good doctor is run out of town and then ignored. It’s all rather downbeat, as it should be, slowly and sadly contemplating a self-interested system of bureaucracy, capitalism, nostalgia, and politics conspiring to ignore scientific evidence for the sake of keeping a sport going unchanged at the expense of the health of its players.

For the passion and importance behind the film, it’s lifeless in execution. As it hits its marks, while leaving strange half-complete implications (why did an NFL chairman resign?) in its wake, actors don’t have much to room to maneuver. Smith plays well off all the white men in suits, projecting exhausted decency, while occasionally playing out a malnourished romantic side-plot with Gugu Mbatha-Raw. She’s asked to be a figure of warmth and compassion helping him onward, but is really just there so he has someone not in his profession to talk to between scenes of autopsies and intimidations. Somehow they both left their charisma behind the camera, deciding to play scenes of light flirtation, deep compassion, and heavy heartbreak with the bare minimum of energy.

Interesting without involving, writer-director Peter Landesman crafts a movie that leaps through the investigations on display to get to conclusions faster, shortens processes for the sake of staring at outcomes. Little time for character nuance, the people speak in informational exchanges. Omalu discovers CTE in a montage. Minds are changed, or not, in the space of wonky expositional dialogue. Tragedies play out on the sides of the frames, hinted at by the damage left in their wake – player’s deaths felt with the grim march of news footage and mourners. This is no Spotlight, patient and methodical in portraying the steps by which a cover-up was exposed. Instead, we get dribs and drabs of information, and are left to fill in gaps. What, exactly, did the NFL do to dismantle Omalu’s professional life in Pennsylvania? And what are we to think has been accomplished by the end, with notes of victory and uncertainty placed side by side?

Landesman’s approach to the material lands it squarely between impassioned op-ed and inspirational biopic, leaving it unsatisfying and unfinished any way you look at it. He doesn’t juggle the jargon with any precision, relying on rapid-fire montage and assumptions to power that plot of professional discovery and moral urgency. Meanwhile, the characters don’t come to life in any meaningful way, spouting facts and discussing right out in the open what other filmmakers might leave as subtext.  The subject matter is dispiriting enough without the movie feeling so incomplete, heavy-handed and full of miss-matched synaptic connections and half-finished thoughts. Maybe the movie itself has been concussed one too many times. Omalu’s story is far more intriguing, and his research far more vital, than the movie manages to portray.

Hello Goodbye: ALOHA

Aloha is another Cameron Crowe picture about a successful man who finds his professional life in jeopardy while his inner life is restored by romance. Furthermore, it’s another of his romantic comedies spiked with office drama, like Jerry Maguire was falling in love while negotiating sports agent business and Matt Damon fell for Scarlett Johansson while she helped him with his zoo in We Bought a Zoo. There’s also Orlando Bloom’s disgraced suit meeting Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown, and you could throw the reality-scrambling Vanilla Sky into the mix, with publisher Tom Cruise crushing on Penelope Cruz, if you view its twisty ending optimistically. In Aloha, a depressed defense contractor (Bradley Cooper) survives an explosive encounter in Kabul and is reassigned to Hawaii, where he’s to negotiate a new roadway through Native Hawaiian territory. His military liaison is a bright charming young woman (Emma Stone). If you already think he’ll fall in love and grow a conscience, you’ve been paying attention.

Because Crowe is a warm writer sincere in his sentimentality, he can usually make his formulaic tendencies work. (Of course, he’s even better when drifting away from formula. It’s why Say Anything… is still his best film.) What’s most peculiar about Aloha is how everything around this central romance plot is much more fascinating and effective than what is inside it. Cooper and Stone have fine chemistry playing two people who have to fall in love because they’re the stars of the movie and the script keeps pushing them together. It’s largely unconvincing, following a period of initial irritation, then intense love, then a tearful misunderstanding, and so on. What’s far more interesting is watching Cooper’s interactions with other characters in a breezy, low-key, undemanding story of a man slowly regrowing his conscience.

This growth takes root as Cooper works with his boss (Bill Murray), a tycoon trying to launch a satellite with the armed forces’ help. One gets the impression Cooper has been unscrupulous in the past. Half-articulated military industrial commentary abounds in a guardedly biting way, as the rich man’s real aims are hidden from the brass (Danny McBride and Alec Baldwin). Meanwhile, both public and private interests are all too willing to manipulate Native Hawaiians to go along with their schemes, trading them land and assistance to wave construction through sacred spaces. This thread is far more interesting than whether or not the girl will fall for the guy, especially when their relationship is so thinly sketched and taken for granted. The story is dusted with a few intimations of magical realism that never amounts to anything, and is resolved far too neatly and softly to retain its teeth, but is a more intriguing element in every way.

Better still is a subplot involving an ex-fiancé of Cooper’s, played by Rachel McAdams with glowing happiness tinged with a hint of regret. It's been a dozen years since their break up. She has two kids (Danielle Rose Russell and Jaeden Lieberher) with a military man (John Krasinski). She loves her family. And yet the appearance of her old love gets her thinking. This storyline features the best writing and acting in the film, Crowe at his best drawing relationships that play out with real compassion and unexpected developments. It’s a reflection of where the main character’s life went wrong, a cozy family unit he’s invited to spend time with, but left just on the outside of embracing. There’s too much history there, and too much pressure to get his job done. If the corruption he encounters is the seed of his moral reawakening, seeing the love he left is the fertilizer for this new growth. 

There are plenty of worthwhile pieces to Aloha, but Crowe doesn’t put them together. They play like separate elements instead of a cohesive whole, connected by character and only faint echoes of each other. It’s telling that the conclusion finds several final moments, tying up individual threads – an arrest, several reconciliations, a tearful reveal – without a feeling of overall finality. This is a film of gentle rhythms and light tropical breezes. French cinematographer Eric Gautier captures lovely island landscapes and floats between the performers with ease. Crowe writes a handful of terrific lines and finds some nice cuts from his record collection for the soundtrack. It’s certainly well intentioned. But why does it feel so slight and disconnected? The writing lacks a certain sparkle, and lingers in disjunction between disparate elements. There are strange asides – a grisly toe injury, a ghostly vision – distractingly out of place, appearing once, then never mentioned again. Hardly a disaster, it’s perhaps best to approach Aloha as a sweet, earnest jumble, likable parts in search of a whole.

Woman Past the Verge of Nervous Breakdown: BLUE JASMINE

As painful and precise a character study as Woody Allen has ever made, Blue Jasmine is built around an incredible performance by Cate Blanchett. She plays Jasmine, a New York City socialite whose banker husband’s financial malfeasance resulted in a rare prison sentence for him. The legal proceedings wiped out their collective wealth and now she’s stuck living with her working class sister (Sally Hawkins) in a tiny apartment in San Francisco. Allen deftly cuts between flashbacks that swim with ostentatious wealth – palatial vacation homes, richly decorated ballrooms, apartments with wide spaces filled with elegant bric-a-brac – and her daily struggle to survive post-scandal. We hear that some time before the film’s present day she was found alone in the street babbling to herself. Coming out of a flashback, the camera sometimes finds her in the corner of the frame, muttering and mumbling about the events we’ve just seen. As the film slowly fills in the full picture of the downfall of her riches and her husband, it’s clear that this damaged woman so tenuously restarting her life is a woman well past the verge of a nervous breakdown. She’s deep in the midst of it, with only fleeting slivers of hope of making it to the other side.

What we have here is a duet between a master filmmaker and a virtuoso performer. Blanchett is remarkably fragile, broken in deeply neurotic ways that run well past the typical Allen type. Here she’s a woman in the middle of a self-deception. Although she’s broke, has barely a cent to her name, she’s stuck in a wealthy state of mind that keeps her realities from sneaking into her consciousness too deeply. Her husband (Alec Baldwin) was a man who kept her in the dark about his business practices, but she was complicit in that lack of information. She enjoyed the rewards too much. In a potent metaphor for recent economic turmoil, he’s caught in the wrongdoings while she’s the one left to scramble with nothing, not even able to fully process what she’s lost. (Of course, that the legal system actually punished this bad banker is a cinematic fantasy.) In one of the opening scenes, she’s complaining to her sister about the conditions of the first class flight that took her to San Francisco. “I thought you said you were broke,” her sister says. “I am!” Jasmine howls, not seeing the contradictions that sit so plainly on the surface of her narrative.

Allen sees them, though, and the film is unsparing as it watches Jasmine struggle. It’s a film that’s scathing and sympathetic, a contradiction that’s reconciled by the push and pull of the film’s elegantly composed, beautifully filmic cinemascope cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe and the raw emotion storming under and cracking through Jasmine’s barely composed exterior. The film is so cleanly cut, crisply crosscut between past and present. It’s gorgeously blocked, stretching across the frame with care. It’s sharply drawn, surrounding the simple story of a woman trying to find some way to put her life back together with a vividly sketched ensemble of strivers that counterbalance the emptiness of her aspirations and vacuousness of the lifestyle she lost.

Her sister’s surrounded by romantic entanglements old and new, an ex-husband (Andrew Dice Clay), a current boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale), and a maybe-new boyfriend (Louis C.K.). They’re all working class guys who draw the scorn of Jasmine. Their personalities clang against the personalities of the wealthy guys she had grown used to. “You settle for the men you think you deserve,” she snaps to her sister. She, on the other hand, sets her sights on a guy (Peter Sarsgaard) who has eyes on climbing a ladder of social influence. Of course she can’t tell him who she really is. Is it better to be honest with a problematic guy you get to know, or dishonest with a guy who remains unproblematic the less you care to know and care to let him know? The answer seems clear.

But Jasmine could care less if she’s doing the right thing, so long as she thinks she is. She has a need to be correct at all times, or at least a need to be seen as correct. She views every slight, no matter how minor, as a personal affront. Any potential career starter she views as beneath her. She wants the results only and wants them now. Told she has to get a job, she sniffs that the only options for a middle-aged college dropout are “menial.” But she doesn’t see herself and her reality in the terms she entertains just long enough to dismiss. She’s an all-American temporarily disadvantaged millionaire waiting for her ship of money to come in. She simply doesn’t know what to do with herself until then. The film doesn’t know what to do with her either, content to show her to us without much else to balance out the cruelty and emotional damage (to herself and others) following her wherever she goes. Allen is content to serve up this character portrait, vivid and wounded, and leave it at that. It’s as invigorating as it is frustrating, a pained fascination with an uncomfortably complicated character worth turning over in one’s mind long after she’s off the screen and the credits have rolled.

The Jack Frost Rises: RISE OF THE GUARDIANS

When it comes to representations of magical legends of childhood, it’s basically Santa Claus or nothing. Rise of the Guardians starts off with a good idea by knocking the jolly old elf down a peg or two by putting him on equal footing with his fictional colleagues: the Easter Bunny, the Sandman, and the Tooth Fairy. The movie imagines them as a sort of holiday-themed supergroup a la The Avengers, using their powers of presents and wonder to protect the children of the world. Would that they could also use their powers to preserve a sense of wonder and fun in this film, but hey, one problem at a time.

At the film’s start, things appear to be relatively peaceful, but soon the apparently long gone Boogeyman appears. He’s gathered some kind of mumbo jumbo ability to convert Sandman’s dream sand into pure nightmare fuel, which leads to some finely animated menace with galloping yellow-eyed sand creatures and roiling seas of black grit. Santa, a burly, tattooed chap with a thick Russian accent activates the Aurora Borealis, which is apparently the secret distress signal for legendary beings. Once assembled, these guardian angels hear from their silent leader, the man on the moon. He signals that the Guardians need a new member to help them save the world’s dreams: Jack Frost.

Frost is a thin, hoodie-wearing scamp who flies around the world spreading cold and snow, touching surfaces with his magic staff that spreads frost in a way reminiscent of the ice-spreading fairies in Fantasia’s Tchaikovsky segment. Though he enjoys bringing slippery ice and snow days to the children of the world, he’s sad that none of them believe in him. When the Guardians show up and ask for his help, he’s reluctant. If you guess that he’ll end up travelling a rough approximation of the hero’s journey from begrudging help to a full-fledged Guardian throughout the course of the movie, you’d be right. This being a rather self-serious, if still determinedly bouncy, fantasy, he’s given the requisite troubled past, though here the twist is that he can’t remember it. (The reveal is one nice card the film has up its sleeve). The plot, adapted from the William Joyce books by playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, becomes a typical clash of good and evil played out thinly, but with some energy.

Every aspect of the film is highly competent, brightly colored and full of hectic movement. The character design is more or less as creative as the voice work is functional. Frost (Chris Pine) is designed, oddly enough, as some kind of teen matinee idol, as if shipped from a Generic Protagonist factory. I liked the rougher conception of Santa (gruffly voiced by Alec Baldwin) as an amiable bruiser with an army of big, helpful yetis and diminutive, largely useless, elves at his command. The Easter bunny (Hugh Jackman) is simply a large rabbit, but I like the way his colorful eggs can sprout legs and hide themselves. The Sandman’s a silent, short, sandy fellow, whereas the Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher) is a giant hummingbird lady who flits to and fro. The Boogeyman, however, makes for a rather bland villain, like someone sanded the distinctiveness off of Tom Hiddleston and gave him the voice of Jude Law. He’s easily dwarfed by his nightmare-magic.

Where the movie fails most of all is in its central thesis. The Guardians gain their powers from children believing in them and so they, in turn, protect children with their powers. That’s all fine, but the film plays out like forced frivolity, constantly extolling the benefits of childlike wonder and belief in magic while being itself depressingly literal about magic while assuming that an audience’s wonder will follow. Though first-time director Peter Ramsey has a nice control over the film’s visuals, no aspect of the film manages to rise above the level of competent. It felt to me like a long 97 minutes, filled with lots of talk of magic, but little magic felt. It clunks along from one sequence to the next, stopping at each of the characters’ lairs for a little bit of visual invention and spinning the oh-so-simple plot in place long enough to movie it ever-so-slightly forward. I’d bet kids won’t mind it so much, but what do I know? I’m not them. It’s a colorful distraction with a modicum of imagination, but all that I can testify to is that sitting through it once was more than enough for me, thanks.

Built in a Day: TO ROME WITH LOVE

To Rome with Love, Woody Allen’s forty-third film, is far too slight to hate outright. It’s a light, whimsical concoction made up of various plotlines following various sets of characters through Rome with no real sense of connection or cohesion. The film’s structure is of mild interest, the postcard-ready cinematography from Darius Khondji is gorgeous, the actors are fine and Allen’s writing is occasionally funny, but the whole enterprise feels so undercooked. Unlike the best of his European films – Vicky Cristina Barcelona, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, and, my favorite of the bunch, Midnight in Paris – there’s no clear reason why the characters, stories or themes within should find themselves set in this particular city. Instead, we’re cycling through a fairly typical series of Allen plots with the lowest amount of charm and dramatic interest necessary to provoke a modicum of my affection in response.

The various plotlines that make up the film are arranged in a dawn-to-dusk structure that opens on the beautiful sunny streets of Rome and ends underneath a sky of twinkling stars, which makes the various timelines of the stories themselves – one takes place over the course of an afternoon, others during few weeks, one over several months – a mildly diverting jumble to keep straight. These plots, the simplest, most gently surrealistic and overtly comic conceits to come from Allen in quite some time, could hardly support a full feature on their own, so it’s good to see that the prolific writer-director has shuffled a handful of half-baked concepts into one film so that we could get them all over with in one underwhelming lump so he and we can move on to better things.

One story in the film follows a pair of native Italians, country newlyweds who arrive in the big city. The wife (Alessandra Mastronardi) gets lost and the husband (Alessandro Tiberi) finds himself mistaken by a prostitute (Penélope Cruz) for her newest client and they’re in the process of arguing when the husband’s family shows up and create a drawn-out case of mistaken identity. The wife ends up stumbling into her own convoluted storyline with mistaken identity and mixed-up romantic signals and so the couple finds their fresh marriage tested in somnambulant screwball scenarios. I couldn’t find this story convincing or effective, although there’s a nice payoff when the husband ends up at a business meeting accompanied by the prostitute and all the business men start sweating bullets upon recognizing the new guy’s companion.

And that’s not even the broadest story in the film. That would be the scenario that finds Roberto Benigni as an average Italian family man who suddenly, inexplicably, becomes famous. He’s hounded everywhere he goes by photographers and reporters, gets invited to fabulous parties and on talk shows, and has beautiful women throwing themselves at them. It’s Allen’s attempt at lampooning those famous for being famous, but the mystery of it all here generates a lack of specificity that stretches too thin for effective satire. A much better comment on celebrity (in a roundabout way) is a storyline starring Allen himself as a retired classical music executive who travels to Rome with his wife (Judy Davis) to meet their daughter (Alison Pill) and her fiancé (Flavio Parenti), as well as their future in-laws. Allen’s delighted to find that the fiancé’s mortician father (Fabio Armiliato) has a great voice for opera, but will only sing in the shower.

All this is mere garnish, however, for the main course of the piece, a somewhat structurally complicated story about a middle-aged architect (Alec Baldwin) who wanders away from his wife’s sightseeing in order to visit the neighborhood in Rome where he spent some post-collegiate years. Once wandering down this memory lane, he meets a young man (Jesse Eisenberg) who recognizes him and invites him to visit his apartment he shares with his girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) and where they are anticipating the arrival of one of her friends from college (Ellen Page). Baldwin lingers around the edges of the scenes that follow, interacting with the characters in ways that make him seem removed from the actual physical, temporal reality of the goings-on. It soon becomes clear (although the film never spells it out) that the young man he met is in fact his younger self. He is literally wandering around, reliving his past. This is the only thread in the film that would almost be enough, with some expansion, to fill up a satisfying feature on its own.

What Woody Allen has here is a collection of scenes and sketches with little reason to be thrown together in this way in this city. But what he does have is a nice sense of commitment to the various conceits of varying realism and broadness, complete and unwavering. And once again Allen proves that he knows good ways to make use of actors, feeding off of their screen personas in ways that make them at once utterly believable in character and completely of a piece within the Allen oeuvre. Of the cast, I’d most like to see Pill, Gerwig, Page, and Eisenberg in a future Allen film. They’re pretty terrific here, finding good ways to perform Allen’s dialogue and scenarios while breathing life into what is ultimately fairly uninvolving lightweight material. 

Old Time Rock and Roll: ROCK OF AGES

Rock of Ages is nothing but fake all the way deep down to its core. It’s without even the slightest nod towards genuine human emotion or dramatic interest with a plot stitched together from naked cliché and generational pandering, a whirlwind jukebox tour through 80’s rock set in a blender and ground up with that decade’s fashion and fads with a wink and snarl. That’s almost a compliment. It’s been put together by Adam Shankman, a choreographer-turned-director who, five years ago, made the delight of the summer with the film adaptation of Broadway’s Hairspray. But that movie had great music, memorable characters, and an enjoyable story. Rock of Ages, adapted from Chris D’Arienzo’s play by Justin Theroux and Allan Loeb, has attitude and wall-to-wall music, but nothing else. Even the attitude is fake, conflicted about whether or not the production is taking a satiric point of view.

Set in what feels like an exaggerated theme-park approximation of 1987, the plot concerns a rundown Los Angeles rock bar run by an aging rock fan (Alec Baldwin) and his right-hand man (Russell Brand) who are besieged by the seemingly uptight mayor (Bryan Cranston) and his ultra-conservative wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who want to shut them down for reasons of back taxes and morality, respectively. But that all takes a back seat to the two-pronged central narrative, half of which is devoted to a dopey love story between aspiring singers (Diego Boneta and Julianne Hough) working at the bar. The other half is dominated by Tom Cruise as Stacee Jaxx, a rock star teetering on the verge of becoming a has-been when he rolls in to give the club a much-needed boost of revenue by performing his final concert before going solo. It’s a dark, admirably weird performance that has Cruise writhing in leather and grinding against groupies. Whenever he enters a room, women faint and the soundtrack swells with guitars in electric palpitations. But the role is barely a caricature, let alone a parody, of an out-of-control rock star. And it’s certainly not a real character for Cruise to play.

Sure, Jaxx is a drunk, spaced-out eccentric with a pet monkey and various addictions, but there’s a point where it all starts to feel like an affectation. This could be a commentary on how show business can, has, and does exploit performers, transforming the talented into out-of-touch egos, churning them out for audiences’ adoration and idolatry, and then casting them aside for the next great thing. You might think that’s where this all is headed with the sweet kids (Boneta and Hough are definitely cute) primed to follow in Jaxx’s cautionary tale footsteps, but the plots take so many swerves from earnest to snarky and back again that it’s hard to know when and if the movie is ever getting around to developing a point of view. That’s the overarching problem with Rock of Ages. It’s both a dull celebration of empty show-biz provocation and commercialism and rejection thereof, all mixed in with these celebrities covering 80’s hits from Poison, Bon Jovi, Journey, REO Speedwagon, Slade, Foreigner, and more.

Lest it threatens to become nothing more than an energetic game of Rock Band with an all-star cast, the film swells to include an ensemble with which to propel the whole thing forward with incident upon incident, contrivance layered upon cliché and pushed along by miscommunications of the most unforgiveable kind, including one of those scenes where two characters talk around the very thing that would solve their problem leaving it unspoken as they go their separate ways. Paul Giamatti plays a slimy producer on the prowl for new talent while he milks every last dollar out of the talent he has. Malin Akerman plays perhaps the worst reporter in rock history (that’s saying something), showing up before the big show to interview Jaxx and then sticking around for some other scenes in the rest of the movie. And Mary J. Blige turns up to sing a number or two (and prove she has the best pipes of the ensemble) as the largely anonymous manager of a strip club. The most satisfying characters are ones we see only briefly in funny little cameos, like horror director Eli Roth as a silver-jumpsuit clad music-video director and Will Forte as a reporter covering Jaxx’s concert and Zeta-Jones’s protest, playing it as essentially his old SNL character Greg Stink.

It all adds up to a mess of simple plot and thin characters barely held together by its chain-reaction of musical numbers edited in a hacked-up fashion that is still somewhat more coherent than what Shankman and his co-conspirators do with the plain old dialogue scenes. It’s often hard to get visual bearings in this production. The group numbers are garbage, but the duets (between Boneta and Hough, Cruise and Akerman, and especially the one entirely unexpected one between Baldwin and Brand) are mostly fun. The cast is certainly energetic and the music is loud and carries with it a certain amount of 80’s charm, but the movie as a whole is an irredeemably junky work of confused kitsch that goes on, and on, and on, and on. By the time the “Don’t Stop Believing” finale gets to that song’s line about how “The movie never ends,” that sure sounded like a threat to me.

IT'S (a little) COMPLICATED

She’s been divorced for ten years but now, on the eve of her youngest child’s college graduation, this intensely successful baker has started an affair with her ex-husband, even though she might be about to find romance with the architect who’s designing her new kitchen. See, that wasn’t so complicated, and yet Nancy Meyers, or some studio executive, has named the movie It’s Complicated anyways. The title is a clue to the true intentions of the movie, though, which is in the spirit of screwball comedies and door-slamming farces where the plot is only as complicated as the characters choose to make it, as they go so far out of their way to hide what they know, or think they know, that they run the risk of running right back into the truth. That spirit is very much present in the movie but Meyers hasn’t a good enough script to stand proudly among the traditions she intends to uphold. To these ears, the movie is probably pretty flat on the page. What saves the movie, making it a very pleasurable and enjoyable experience, is the sheer luminosity of the stars involved.

The baker is Meryl Streep, genuinely radiant here, bouncing delightfully off of the ex-husband played by a pitch-perfect Alec Baldwin. Together, they take the drabbest scenes and spruce them up through line readings and twinkling eyes into something approaching believable. They sparkle and crackle their way through the plot with cheery good-nature and glistening precision. They’re impossible to hate. Steve Martin as well, as the architect, turns what could have been a one-note milktoast role into a small work of much charm. Continuing the trend of elevating the material is John Krasinski, as Streep and Baldwin’s soon-to-be-son-in-law, getting some of the biggest laughs with his charm and delivery, rivaling all on screen for sheer likability. The movie’s at its best when it winds up the characters and lets the personalities bounce off each other in believably entertaining ways. The funniest moment involves an unexpected combination of characters getting stoned at a graduation party, which also makes it the funniest on-screen drug trip of the year.

It’s too bad Meyers doesn’t do her cast any favors by shooting the film as blandly slick as possible and stranding them in palatial settings of barely believable wealth and prosperity. She even mucks around with the plotting until the long sizzling of the plot comes to an unsatisfying rushed ending that seems to cut corners and denies the opportunity for the truly marvelous payoff that feels owed. The way the whole situation is finally unveiled to all of the characters is too neat and tidy, and the choice Streep makes ultimately feels too hurried. But even all that doesn’t take the shine off of the good times. It’s a very slight, completely inconsequential movie, but it becomes an enjoyable one through the seemingly effortless work of its stars.

My Sister's Keeper (2009)

From the time she took her first breath, eleven-year-old Anna (Abigail Breslin) has been donating blood, tissues, and organs to her sister’s leukemia fight. Now, with a dangerous transplant operation looming, Anna decides she’s had enough. She hires a hot-shot lawyer (Alec Baldwin) to sue her parents for medical emancipation. This sets the stage for My Sister’s Keeper, an adaptation of the Jodi Picoult novel, it shares its source’s main strengths and its main problem. Both book and film have a great grabber of a concept that plays on the heartstrings but neither have any way of satisfyingly resolving its central moral dilemma.

With whom do you side? Is it the young girl who is frustrated at being created for the sole purpose of keeping her sister alive? Is it the exhausted-yet-determined mom (Cameron Diaz) who won’t stop fighting until her sick child is well? This is truly a matter of life and death. It’s not easy to take a side. There are no easy answers, and the movie isn’t interested in answering them, all for the better. The movie gets by on its emotionally resonating performances (Diaz is a standout). As a result, for most of its runtime, the movie is a super-slick Hollywood tear-jerker, a three-hankie salute to disease that is shot through with nearly suffocating sentimentality. This movie is on a mission to make you cry. The only discordant notes are struck with dreary and sappy soundtrack choices, bad songs to go with terrible montages.

The courtroom drama aspect of the plot is shoved to the background, the filmmakers choosing to instead focus on the grueling medical procedures and slow-motion decay of its central girl. Young actress Sofia Vassilieva is dolled up in the trappings of a cancer-patient with admirable attention to detail from the make-up department. It’s unflinchingly frank at times. The movie barely starts and we’ve seen our first nosebleed. Vomiting blood, eerie veins under pale translucent skin, and creeping bruises also make appearances. I really should have thought twice before buying the popcorn I ended up barely touching. All the attention to medical detail creates a visceral sense of what the family (we bounce between points of view, which unfortunately means narration replaces subtext) is arguing about, grounding the melodrama in ways a network TV-movie couldn’t. This is not a film that is shy about its topic.

And yet, the movie can’t bring its varying threads to a satisfying close. Instead, it goes into emotional overdrive – albeit in a different way than in the novel – yanking on the heartstrings and massaging the tear ducts with such single-minded intensity that it would seem the filmmakers would like your sobbing to cover up the lack of conclusion. (The book and movie differ only in content, not quality). Though there is certainly an endpoint to the plot – something definitively final occurs – there is no emotional resolution. Diaz, especially, is asked to sell some rushed characterization that I just didn’t buy.

Director Nick Cassavetes, who previously directed the equally teary The Notebook, knows the time and location of the buttons to press, though. As a disease-of-the-week weeper, My Sister’s Keeper is a mostly acceptable entry. It goes through the motions, and puts it audience through the emotional wringer, even if it doesn’t quite add up in the end.