Review: "Landline"

Actress Jenny Slater reteams with her “Obvious Child” director/screenwriter, Gillian Robespierre, for another comedically observational look at the trials of young womanhood.

“Landline” follows a twentysomething woman played by Slater toeing the precipice of marriage and concurrent anxiety about permanency, as well as her teenage sister caught in the phase of acting out and seeking all around her for meaning, and finding only disappointment in her immediate surroundings.

It's a smart, tender, wry and sensitive portrait of a family in turmoil. Edie Falco and John Turturro play the parents, harried in their own lives and bewildered by the two independent-minded women they’ve raised. They have their own problems as well, which Robespierre explores with co-screenwriter Elisabeth Holm, who also worked on the story for “Child.”

Set in 1995, the title refers to the numerous telephone conversations in the movie, before mobile phones were ubiquitous. Most of the impact interactions take place face-to-face, however, and “Landline” also speaks to the deeper connection the sisters form throughout the course of the story when circumstances throw them into unexpected proximity.

Slate plays Dana, who superficially seems pretty stable with a decent starter job, apartment and fiancé, Ben (Jay Duplass). They get on well together, but even before the wedding vows take place a sense of sameness has crept into the relationship. The sex has even gone stale, which they attempt to solve with an unfortunate change of locale. But Dana discovers deeper cravings she’s afraid will get stifled.

This leads to a flirtation with college flame Nate (Finn Wittrock), whose crooked smile and off-kilter regard for things like marriage and family personify Dana’s increasingly chilly feet.

Abby Quinn plays Ali, who’s about 16 but seems to have skipped over the teen angst phase and hurried straight into menopausal orneriness. Her dad, Alan (Turturro), jokes that maybe getting mugged will tame her nighttime wanderings, but then takes it back: muggers would be too scared of her.

Ali is in a hurry: to grow up, to drink and do drugs, to lose her virginity, to go to college or whatever else it takes to get away from her parents as soon as possible. She has a guy she keeps around (Marquis Rodriguez) to help with her carnal explorations, but Ali treats him as an appliance to her own evolution.

One of the more interesting things about “Landline” is the way the women tend to use men poorly, rather than the other way around. Early on the girls discover love poetry written by their dad, an advertising copywriter and wannabe playwright, to a mysterious woman named “C.” They spend much of the movie trying to sniff out who that is -- not quite believing such a self-doubting person would have the gumption to cheat.

They nurse their secret resent for their dad, even as Dana carries out the exact same sort of duplicity, and Ali casually squashes her would-be boyfriend’s feelings when they intrude up on her plans.

Falco is the center of the clan as matriarch Pat, who has a very public position of power and employs a slightly softer version of that on the home front. In one scene she dismisses her husband as a “failure” in front of their daughter, and Turturro’s face is a mask of restrained pain. Pat’s not a bad person, but she’s been shouldering the parenting load for so long, she can’t help resent her floundering mate.

Things go on, with much pain as well as laughter. The appeal of “Landline” is its spot-on observation of characters who resemble real people rather than Hollywood constructs conveying themselves from Point A to B in the plot. These people knock around, sidestepping and backtracking, in a chaotic path that bends (hopefully) toward grace.

Video review: "La La Land"

I’ve been accused of being a “La La Land” hater. It’s not really so. I admired a lot about writer/director Damien Chazelle’s second feature film, and am a big fan of his first, “Whiplash.” It’s a gorgeous love letter to the city of Los Angeles, as well as a homage to old-school film musicals of the Golden Age of movies.

I just didn’t think it deserved the mountain of Oscar nominations it received, which tied “All About Eve” for the most ever.

“La La Land” is a little bit of a lot of things -- funny, sad, romantic, melodious, handsome, charming. But it just doesn’t impact you in one or two strong ways. Rather than landing hard with both feet, the film dances around you like a zephyr, entertaining but not engrossing.

For movies, it’s better to do a few things well rather than try to be a lot of things at once.

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone play Sebastian and Mia, struggling young L.A. artists. He’s a jazz purist who pounds the keys for coins, but keeps losing jobs because he doesn’t want to stick to the stingy playlists. She works as a barista to the stars but dreams of becoming one herself. She goes on an endless series of soul-numbing auditions, where casting directors take phone calls while she’s performing.

They waltz through a familiar boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-wants-girl-back narrative. In between the movie also puts the pair through their paces in several musical numbers (composed by Justin Hurwitz). The tunes aren’t particularly memorable, and neither Stone or Gosling will ever be confused with singers.

I like “La La Land,” admire things about it. But it didn’t even crack my list of the top 25 movies of 2016.

Bonus features are excellent, and even the DVD edition has a handsome suite of goodies. Though you’ll have to pay for the Blu-ray version to get everything.

The DVD has a feature-length commentary track with Chazelle and Hurwitz and three making-of featurettes focusing on specific musical numbers, as well as a piece on song selection.

The Blu-ray adds a host of more featurettes, focusing on things like Gosling learning to play piano for the movie and John Legend making his featuring film acting debut. Best bonus bit: “Damien & Justin Sing: The Demos,” in which the guys behind the camera and piano, respectively, belt out some tunes.

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Review: "La La Land"

“La La Land” is kind of adorable and kind of inconsequential. It’s writer/director Damien Chazelle’s (“Whiplash”) ode to Old Hollywood, both the city of Los Angeles and the musical films it once spawned like sunrises.

It’s a stunning-looking movie, with eye-pleasing vistas, vivid colors and detailed production design and costumes. Not to mention the eminently ogle-able stars, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. You could take their faces and charms and transpose them into any Hollywood musical from its 1940s and ‘50s heydays, and they would not look out of place.

Both, alas, have rather modest singing voices. Hers is breathy and girly; his has a narrow range to which Justin Hurwitz, who composed the songs and soundtrack, carefully bookends his melodies so as not to strain. “City of Stars” is the most memorable tune and main theme, repeated in various forms and with both singers.

The story’s as old-fashioned as can be: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy tries to woo girl back. The narrative only really takes on some heft in the final act, as our star-crossed lovers struggle to reconcile their passions and hearts -- which don’t necessarily always point in the same direction.

Chazelle uses a nifty parallel structure, so we see the tale unfold from first one perspective, and then the other. Later, this trick will be used again, unspooling in the opposite direction.

Gosling is Sebastian, a jazz purist eking out an existence hammering standards on the piano at a hip restaurant. But he has a tendency to lapse into his own compositions, much to the ire of the owner (J. K. Sebastian). One night in walks Mia (Stone), an aspiring actress worn out from endless auditions, and she’s smitten.

It’s got all the ingredients of a classic Meet Cute – until Sebastian angrily brushes past her after getting canned.

But they do meet again, he’s a little more attentive this time, and things rise from there. A long walk to parked cars ends in a dance against the starry sky, with Gosling and Stone (or at least their doubles) flowing beautiful in a pas de deux. Later they’ll wind up at the planetarium and their hoofing will grow more literally celestial.

Their careers rise and fall, which alters and leavens their romance. Sebastian abandons his principles to join a very lucrative band that’s more Kenny G than Coltrane. Soon he’s on the road all the time, doing interviews, making bank but emptying out his reserves of integrity. Mia, meanwhile, gives up on auditions and her day job as a barista to stage her own one-woman play.

I find myself deeply in like with this movie. It’s charming, it’s gorgeous, it’s nostalgic without seeming like a mere throwback. But I was emotionally detached during most of it. I understood Mia and Sebastian as constructs for a story, not living beings I could invest in. “La La Land” gives us the ol’ razzle-dazzle, but doesn’t get around to plucking the heart strings.

Video review: "The Big Short"

Fresh off its Oscar win for Best Adapted Screenplay (and a strong late bid for Best Picture), I’m hoping more people will give “The Big Short” a look. I’ve no doubt many potential ticket buyers took one look at the subject matter – high finance rebels who foresaw the real estate bubble bursting – and said, “No, thanks.”

What they need to know is how smart, funny and downright entertaining this movie is. While its primary fuel is anger at a rigged system, the film uses comedy as its entry point.

Consider Adam McKay, director and co-writer, whose previous credits include lowbrow comedies “Anchorman,” “Step Brothers” and “The Other Guys.” And Steve Carell as Mike Baum, a cartoonishly loud and obnoxious money manager. Even Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt and Christian Bale, actors not normally known for eliciting laughs, are funny and engaging in an ensemble cast with no real traditional lead.

What’s most astounding is how the film takes a complex subject and breaks it down into digestible bites. The problem began when financial institutions started packaging risky mortgages as assets to be traded and sold. There’s no real single villain, just a system in which everyone looked the other way -- including the government’s watchdogs -- in order to maintain the appearance of financial stability.

Hilarious and bitter, “The Big Short” is a heist movie in which we’re the ones getting fleeced, and the good guys are the ones pointing to the crime who get dismissed as loons.

Bonus features are pretty decent, though you’ll have to buy the Blu-ray upgrade to get them: the DVD contains none.

These include five making-of documentary shorts: “In the Trenches: Casting,” “The Big Leap: Adam McKay,” “Unlikely Heroes: The Characters of The Big Short,” “The House of Cards: The Rise of the Fall” and “Getting Rea: Recreating an Era.” There are also several deleted scenes.

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Review: "The Big Short"

I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a movie as simultaneously funny and angry as “The Big Short.”

Ostensibly a dramatic, spit-flecked tirade against the real estate crash and the widespread financial shenanigans that caused it, the film is also wickedly hilarious, dripping in black humor and rife with sharp one-liners. It’s a smart, insightful howl against a system that was rigged -- and, the movie argues, still is.

Here is a sure Oscar contender, and one of the year’s best films.

Director and co-writer Adam McKay, known for lowbrow comedies often starring Will Ferrell (“Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy”) unbeloved by me, makes the unlikeliest left turn in Hollywood history. He and Charles Randolph deftly adapt the book by Michael Lewis, celebrating a disparate band of anti-heroes who bet against the real estate market when the rest of the world of high finance, from the most junior broker to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, viewed it as Gibraltar solid.

The most amazing accomplishment of the film, beyond maintaining that bravura blend of wit and fury, is making the complicated world of mortgage financing not only understandable, but turning it into the villain of the piece. We glimpse a few smarmy manipulators, a handful of real estate brokers writing mortgages they know their clients won’t be able to pay, etc. – but they’re cogs in the machine.

Christian Bale plays Michael Burry, a former M.D. who founded his own hedge fund. It was he who first looked at how banks were packaging subprime mortgages and selling the debt as an asset, using volume to hide the millions of cracks in what appeared to most observers to be an unassailable wall of strength. Burry, a kook who runs his office barefoot, bet early and bet big that it would all come tumbling down.

Others took his cue and ran with it, further uncovering pieces of the jumbled puzzle. Steve Carell is terrific as Mark Baum, a money manager operating his own shop under the umbrella of Morgan Stanley. A provocateur who lashes out at those who seek to take advantage of others – an odd disposition for an investor, obviously – Baum sees the looming crisis as less an opportunity than a fount of outrage.

Ryan Gosling plays Jared Vennett, a slick operator who helps put the pieces together for others and acts as our snide narrator. Brad Pitt turns up as Ben Rickert, a dispossessed trader brought in to act as mentor/facilitator by a pair of young hotshots (John Magaro and Finn Wittrock) who sniff out the opportunity. Pure mercenaries looking for a score at first, they slowly become educated that those numbers on a spreadsheet represent real homes, families, lives.

The story essentially moves forward as a triad, each of the three investor groups experiencing pushback and pressure from their colleagues. Just when we think the house of cards must come tumbling down, it magically stays afloat through the sorcery of confidence and delusion.

Like “Spotlight,” this is an ensemble film that essentially has no central character or leading performances. Only with Carell’s Baum do we learn much about him outside of the office, which provides a little illumination into how somebody dedicated to making money could wear his conscious so plainly on his sleeve. As good as he was in “Foxcatcher,” Carell is even better here.

Even as it lauds the rebels who went against the grain and said ‘no’ when everyone else said ‘yes,’ “The Big Short” never lets us forget that the accounting chicanery that caused the worst recession since the 1930s is the real story. Burry, Baum and company may have won a pile of money for their insight. But we all lost in the big game we didn’t even know was being played.

Review: "My All American"

I'm indifferent to most sports but have an abiding affection for quality sports movies. When done right, they can evoke universal, almost mythic themes about humans striving toward a goal and finding the best of themselves through games.

Hoosier filmmaker Angelo Pizzo knows something on the topic, having penned screenplays for two of the most enduring sports movies in recent memory: "Hoosiers" and "Rudy." Now he's stepped behind the camera, too, writing and directing "My All American," about hitherto little-known University of Texas football player Freddie Steinmark.

This film is sure to be remembered among the first two in the annals of iconic sports pictures.

This is the sort of unapologetically humanistic, wholesome moviemaking that Frank Capra ("It Happened One Night") used to practice. Pizzo approaches his subject without an ounce of irony or disdain. It's the sort of film that is corny when done wrong, and tugs insistently at the heart when done right. Here, cast and crew maintain an absolute straightforward tone and hit all the right notes.

Freddie (Finn Wittrock) is a straitlaced kid from Colorado. He's the star of the high school football team, despite being undersized. Freddie is from a religious family that believes that hard work and dedication are everyday expectations, not favors to be rewarded. He falls for a smart girl, Linda (Sarah Bolger), and insists that his whole life lies stretched out before him: scholarship at Notre Dame, drafted by the Denver Broncos, a daughter and three sons... maybe four.

Of course, things don't work out that way. Freddie is ignored by all the football schools owing to his diminutive stature -- until coach Darrell Royal comes calling from Austin. Freddie believes his best friend, Bobby Mitchell (Rett Terrell), is the real target: big, strong, a natural athlete. But Royal (Aaron Eckhart) sees something in the scrappy kid and offers a full scholarship.

The middle section is largely occupied with the on-field play, and Pizzo, with the help of cinematographer Frank G. DeMarco, constructs some tight action sequences that are slam-bam thrilling while still seeming realistic. A running back in high school, Freddie transforms himself into a safety and kick returner.

Meanwhile, he befriends fourth-string quarterback James Street -- played well by his real-life son, Juston -- and together they hatch plans to eventually become the respective kings of the offense and defense.

If you've seen the trailers for "My All American," then you know that tragedy befalls Freddie in the midst of a fabulous college career, about which I will speak no more. Suffice it to say that his struggles to establish himself as a football star pale in comparison to his challenges off the field.

Wittrock, with his blue-eyed earnestness and sweet charm, captures the essence of a guy born with gifts and limitations, who made the most of the former and ignored the latter. Eckhart is solid and stern as the wise coach Royal, but I was glad the screenplay also fleshed him out with moments of humor and warmth.

("We fell in love faster than Eggo," is just one of several Royalisms.)

The music by John Paesano swells with strings admirably at just the right moments to enhance the emotions without intruding.

This is golly-gosh-good filmmaking, the sort some will sneer at for its saccharine qualities. But it's the sweet moments that give the bitter parts their bite -- and vice-versa -- just as you can only truly savor victory after becoming intimate with defeat. "My All American" is Angelo Pizzo's threepeat.

Review: "Unbroken"

“Unbroken” is the sort of story that if it weren’t true, people would dismiss it as Hollywood hoo-ha. But Louis “Louie” Zamperini really lived this life: Olympic athlete who competed at the 1936 games in Berlin, WWII bombardier whose plane crashed into the Pacific, surviving 47 days at sea before being captured and subjected to two years of torment as a prisoner of war.

This movie, which I think one of the most powerful of the year, hasn’t received much love from other critics, and I find that puzzling. Is it the presence of Anjelina Jolie as director, and a certain snootiness towards glamorous movie stars stepping behind the camera? If so, I’ll just remind them people said the same thing about Clint Eastwood and Mike Nichols … and they didn’t turn out too bad.

To my mind, Jolie acquits herself splendidly, hitting the emotional high and low notes just right, as well as staging a few daring action scenes. Clearly, she’s got a future behind the camera if she carries out her threat to abandon acting.

Chiding of the screenplay seems more well-placed. The script has some big names on it – Joel and Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese, William Nicholson – as well as being based on a book by Laura Hillenbrand, who also penned the splendid “Seabiscuit.”

But it is a fairly conventional narrative presentation. And, as others have pointed it, it almost seems to combine elements of three famous Oscar-winning films into one: the Olympics sequence from “Chariots of Fire,” the lifeboat part from “Life of Pi” and the POW stuff from “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” 

Oh well. The historical record is what it is. The movie also truncates the latter portion of Hillenbrand’s book, which deals with Zamperini’s (unsurprisingly) difficult transition to civilian life and religious awakening.

Jack O’Connell is solid as Zamperini, but I do think this sort of movie might have been better served by having a more recognizable actor in the main role. Since the screenplay doesn’t really attempt to get inside the character’s head, but observes his trials and tribulations from without, audiences might have a harder time connecting emotionally with him. We need more of a touchstone.

The supporting cast is terrific. I especially liked Domhnall Gleeson as Phillips, the pilot of the bomber that crashes into the ocean, who has a sort of reserved grace, and Jai Courtney and Garrett Hedlund as fellow POWs, who know they can’t help him directly when the guards are beating him to a pulp, but cheer on silently.

If I have one serious complaint with the movie, it’s Japanese singer/actor Miyavi as the sadistic head guard the prisoners refer to as “The Bird,” because he sees everything. Most of what’s depicted really happened – the Bird was sent into hiding as a war criminal after Japan’s surrender.

OK, so he’s a bad guy. But the film turns him into a cloying, effeminate monster who sidles up to his charges and whispers in their ear before delivering a beating. His eyes even look odd, like he’s been made up with excessive mascara or something. The end result is the Bird feels like a cartoon, much like the Michael Fassbender character in “12 Years a Slave.”

It’s like they’re trying to cram all the evil of an era into a single figure, and it rings false.

Still, “Unbroken” was one of the most riveting cinematic experiences I had this year. The lesson of Louie Zamperini isn’t that he was tougher and braver than everyone else, but that this power to withstand desperate challenges resides in all of us if we can find it.