Review: "Money Monster"

Just a few thoughts, as our newest talent, Aly Caviness, is handling the main review over at The Film Yap. Make sure to head there to read in its entirety.

"Money Monster" is a well-executed cinematic effort with tightly bookended ambitions. Unlike "The Big Short," it's not trying -- or, if it is, not trying very hard -- to be an all-encompassing indictment of Wall Street and the corruption of modern digitized market trading. It aims for small observations and dramatic tension.

It gives lip service to The System and how bad it is, but then leans on a narrative that makes clear it's a rotten apple or two who are actually mucking things up.

George Clooney plays Lee Gates, the host of the titular television show in which the smart, smarmy personality gives stock tips and ass-kisses the financial masters of the universe, in between embarrassing hip-hop dance moves and weirdo costumes. It's a slight exaggeration of Jim Cramer and his ilk, but only slight.

It's a hostage story in which some dumb mook off the street took Lee's stock advice and lost his entire inheritance from his mother, and now wants revenge, an explanation or an apology.

Directed by Jodie Foster from a screenplay by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore and Jim Kouf, "Monster" provides a couple of terrific moments that I appreciated.

The first is when Lee, after first having got over the shock of having his show interrupted by a gunman who straps him into a bomb vest, finally gets around to engaging the guy, a truck driver named Kyle (Jack O'Connell). He's a talker, so he figures he'll talk to the young man. That's when he learns how much Kyle lost: $60,000.

Sixty grand? Lee asks, shocked. You're gonna kill me, maybe die yourself, over chump change like that?

Lee is a man who brags about sharing dinner at an expensive restaurant with at least one other person every night since the 1990s. He's got his millions, three ex-wives, thousand-dollar suits, etc. He's lived at the top so long, he can't even conceive of a working schmoe having to slave away at $14/hour, taking a year to save up the money he'll spend on a weekend getaway.

The second moment is when, trying to verify something allegedly said on his show a few weeks ago, Lee is forced to watch tape of himself played back on the screen. All this is happening, I should mention, on live TV, with Julia Roberts as Patty Fenn, the director in the control booth trying to keep things calm.

Lee watches the playback of himself in some ridiculous outfit, doing a dance a man of his years should not be attempting, saying stuff because it makes for good TV and not because it adds up to an ounce of fiscal sense. Clooney, who shines playing flawed men, gives a little dip of the head, his gaze faltering downward, and we bathe in his confrontation with his own meager worth.

He's a clown who revels at playing the clown, until he's forced to breathe dip the smell of the face paint, and is sickened.

Alas, the rest of the movie falls into predictable patterns. The cops come to take out Kyle, a negotiator is brought in, the action eventually leaves the studio, a weird sort of alliance forms between Lee and his captor, etc. Patty is the level-headed island of calm trying to keep all these vying forces in balance. Roberts is solid, but it's the kind of role any number of actresses could do just as well.

There is a good surprise or two. My favorite is when someone close to Kyle is located and brought in to talk him down, something we've seen many times before, and events do not transpire in any way we expected. For a brief moment, the movie pushes us out on a limb. We're delighted by the feeling of an abyss yawning; but then our steps are nudged back to the safe and dull path.

Dominic West plays the CEO of IBIS, the big corporation whose stock tanked despite Lee's reassurances to his viewers; Caitriona Balfe is the PR chief who goes rogue for reasons unexplored; Giancarlo Esposito is the head of the police force, uttering urgent things we can safely ignore; Lenny Venito is the podunk cameraman who keeps on shooting despite the danger to himself; and Christopher Denham is Lee's flunky producer tasked with anything the boss wants, including trying out an erectile claim before it goes on the market.

"Money Monster" plays out in live time, and Foster is adroit at balancing the tension and danger, stirring the pot when needed and backing off the heat when the audience needs to absorb information or take a breath. The movie also has a pleasing streak of dark humor to it, much of it deriving from Lee's feckless charm.

All the stuff about trading algorithms and international hackers being brought in to help is distracting or strains credulity. But this is the sort of movie where you have to just go along with the ride. It's a day trade of a film, serving its purpose but soon left behind.

Video review: "Elysium"

“Elysium” was one of my personal biggest disappointments of 2013. Along with “Pacific Rim,” it was one of the two summer films I had alighted upon as holding the most potential for thrills. Alas, while “Rim” soared as high as expectations, “Elysium” was a clanky, clunky mess.

Set in the year 2154, “Elysium” imagines a world in which all the rich people have departed the planet to float serenely in a grand space station where they make their home. There everyone is happy and healthy, due in large part to the amazing medical beds everyone has in their houses that can instantly cure any sickness or heal every wound.

Down on Earth it’s a different story: it’s overcrowded, environmentally fouled, crime is rampant and healthcare elusive. Needless to say, the downtrodden are very eager to get up to Elysium to make use of these magic cure boxes, so illegal immigration is a big problem for the richies.

Matt Damon is a worker drone who accidentally gets irradiated and only has five days to live. Outfitted with a powerful exo-skeleton by some criminal types, he agrees to do a dirty job in exchange for a trip to Elysium. But things grow more complicated when he gets caught up in a political plot involving the conniving defense minister (Jodie Foster). She sics her fearsome pet mercenary (Sharlto Copley) on him, and the latter half of the film essentially becomes one long chase scene.

The action sequences are engaging enough in their own right, but the attempt to continually draw parallels with our own time are rather blatant, not to mention inept. If those privileged folks have so many of the miraculous medical devices, why wouldn’t they install a few planet-side – if for no other reason, to address their problem with infiltrators?

Writer/director Neill Blomkamp (“District 9”) comes up with some terrifically original ideas. But “Elysium” bogs down in boneheaded plotting and political posturing.

Bonus features are aren’t bad, though they tend to focus more on the nuts-and-bolts of filming a big-budget science fiction film than the creative process.

The DVD contains just two featurettes, one focusing on assembling the cast and crew, and the other on designing the utopian space station. Go for the Blu-ray set and you get three more featurettes on the technology and visual effects to depict the distant future. You also get an extended scene and “The Journey to Elysium,” a video diary covering the pre-production, film shoot and post-production processes.

Movie:

Extras:

Review: "Elysium"

"Elysium" isn't an awful movie, but it could've been a really good one. Its high potential only seems to underscore its failings.

It's a politically-themed science fiction drama about a dystopian future where the divide between the haves and the have-nots has quite literally grown into an impenetrable chasm between two worlds, with the elite floating serenely above the Earth's surface in a massive eponymous space station. The political stuff is obvious but effective, and seen as a straight-ahead chase picture it's quite engaging for stretches.

Its problems arise from a combination of heavy-handedness and bone-headedness. Writer/director Neill Blomkamp, who made the wildly original "District 9" a few years ago, asks us to invest in a story premise that makes absolutely no sense, no matter how you turn it around to peer at it. He would have us believe that the world's rich and powerful have lost every trace of humanity, even to the point of condemning billions of people to die when they could easily save them with little effort.

Furthermore, they would stubbornly hold onto this life-saving technology even if sharing it could solve all of the problems on their little slice of utopia, too. So they're both selfish and stupid.

In the year 2154, the planet has become one big garbage dump filled with disease, violence and overcrowding. Max DeCosta is a born troublemaker, a legendary car thief now trying to go straight as a factory worker that builds the robots that brutally enforce law and order. We get to see just how brutal in the opening minutes, when Max has his arm viciously broken by a robot cop for no reason while he's on his way to work.

With his boyish, wholesome looks, Matt Damon is a bit unconvincing as a sarcastic badass. Even with a shaved head and multitude of tattoos and scars, he still looks like a choir boy wearing his Halloween get-up. As near as we can determine through flashbacks to his childhood, Max's only dream in life has been to get to Elysium, since it represents something more than his squalid little life.

After an industrial accident at his plant leaves him irradiated with only five days to live, Max's urgency to reach Elysium grows urgent. That's because there they have these miraculous medical beds that can instantly heal all injuries and cure all wounds. Unless Max gets to one of these Magic Cure Boxes, he'll die.

But the rich and haughty do not like the downtrodden to use their Magic Cure Boxes because ... well, we're not really sure what their objection is. They're so common on Elysium that every house and public building has one. The residents use them constantly, not only to heal themselves but to keep their (almost entirely Caucasian) flesh looking young -- even cosmetic alterations like hair and eye color, and little scar designs they seem to favor.

Meanwhile down on Earth, deadly disease and injury still reign, so it doesn't take a whole lot of guessing to deduce the people would like to get themselves up to Elysium and hop inside one of the Magic Cure Boxes for what ails them. The steely Secretary of Defense Delacourt (Jodie Foster) shoots down as many incoming shuttles as she can, but still many "illegal immigrants" get through. (Subtle enough for you?)

Max strikes a deal with Spider (Wagner Moura), a hacker/crime boss, to do a job for him in exchange for a trip to Elysium. To help him survive his radiation sickness and be more effective in combat, he's outfitted with a clunky exoskeleton that's literally screwed into his body, making him fearsomely strong. He's even got a little TV screen and computer on the back of his head for mining "brain data."

They're supposed to kidnap a highly-placed Elysium executive (William Fichtner) who's on Earth for business, and tap his brain for financial data. Little do they know he and Delacourt have hatched a plan to stage a coup of Elysium by rebooting their entire computer system, and that rebel code gets zapped into Max's brain, too.

The rest of the movie plays out as one big long chase, as Max attempts to get a ride to Elysium while being hunted by Delacourt's hand-picked operative, a cackling bad guy named Kruger (Sharlto Copley). We're told that Kruger is mentally deranged and responsible for a bunch of war crimes. He's supposed to be maniacally evil and bombastic, but with Copley letting his South African accent unfurl at full speed, it's hard to even understand much of what he says.

(It's the "Bane" problem all over again: It's difficult to be really scared of someone when you can't comprehend their nefarious mutterings.)

Movies like this often have a totally unnecessary romantic interest, and here it's supplied by Alica Braga as Grey, a childhood friend of Max's who is now a nurse and mother of a little girl who -- wait for it -- is dying of end-stage leukemia. Soon their destinies are linked.

These characters never really seem to mesh together. Delacourt in particular is an impenetrable puzzle, with Foster supplying her own odd accent and mannerisms. She regards the Elysium leadership as spineless mamby-pambies who won't do what's necessary to fight the illegal infiltrator scourge.

Here's the thing, though: If the only problem they have on Elysium is the unwanted immigrants, and the only reason the Earth residents want to get to Elysium is so they can use the Magic Cure Boxes, why in the world wouldn't they just install a few planetside? Forget the idea that Elysium-ites are completely selfish and self-serving -- what do they lose by sharing their technology if it keeps out the riff-raff?

As he showed with "District 9," Blomkamp is a talented and original director who comes up with great ideas -- it just seems like he didn't think this one through very well. He's also one of those filmmakers who's good at staging action scenes from a distance, but when it gets down to hand-to-hand combat everything becomes a blurred mess. (Hand! Foot! Elbow! Fist! Knee! Knee! Knee!)

I think "Elysium" wants to be an allegorical tale about how the problems of the future mirror our own today. But it's trapped inside the body of a summer action movie, setting up characters and plot paces that are momentarily engaging but don't make a lick of sense when you take two steps back.

Review: "Carnage"

Films based on stage plays are never hard to spot. There's the compressed cast, the static location and the carefully bookended world that exists around the characters. Perhaps most recognizably, and often to the detriment of adapting a work from stage to screen, is the theatricality -- the artifice -- of the proceedings.

"Carnage" is a wonderfully acted drama about two sets of parents, played by Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly. That's three Oscar winners and an Oscar nominee, folks.

As one might expect from such a dazzling cast, and one led by an expert director like Roman Polanski, the performances are a delight. The parents, Michael and Penelope Longstreet (Reilly and Foster) and Nancy and Alan Cowan (Winslet and Waltz), are brought together by a serious brawl between their 11-year-old sons.

Outwardly, everyone is trying to act maturely and magnanimously, endeavoring to resolve the situation without resorting to lawsuits and hysterics. Soon, though, things devolve into a quagmire of clashing egos, ulterior motives and two marriages that have carefully spackled over their deep fault lines.

"Carnage" is based on the play by Yasmina Reza, who co-wrote the screenplay with Polanski. The dialogue is sharp and stealthy, as four smart Manhattan parents reveal the bile and loathing hidden by their upper-class veneer.

The problem is, I never for a moment bought these characters as real people. As much as I often enjoyed basking in their verbal parries and thrusts, the action is always kept at emotional arm's length, as we watch these carefully constructed creatures run through their paces with all the surprises of a pre-programmed automaton.

Still, the performers themselves are nearly worth the price of admission.

Penelope is a politically correct, New Age-y type with a carefully cultivated sense of victimhood. She takes her boy's injury (the loss of two teeth) personally, and is not looking for revenge, but abject contrition. When she fails to receive it, it uncorks some serious anger beneath the placid surface.

(It's notable that the avowed peace-lover is the only one of the foursome who resorts to violence as things grow tense.)

Mike is garrulous and friendly, always ready to be seen as the mediator of conflict. But his blustery personality hides some troubling issues, from the minor (a pathological fear of his daughter's hamster) to the major (declaring marriage and children the bane of manhood).

Nancy is an investment broker, carefully coiffed and mannered, who's eternally vexed at Alan's eternal interruptions to talk business on his cell phone. A high-profile lawyer, he's handling a huge case in between needling the Longstreets.

Alan is the most mercenary of the bunch, making it quite plain he considers the spat between their sons an overblown waste of his time. But in some ways he's also the most honest, since he doesn't bother to hide the selfish instincts the others work hard to conceal.

Everything plays out in a crisp 79-minute encounter in the Longstreets' apartment, punctuated by conversations about the Darfur atrocity, the best kind of toilet mechanism and an impressive spew of vomit onto some rare art books.

"Carnage" works better when seen as a master class in acting than a workable, believable story.

2.5 stars out of four

Video review: "The Beaver"

"The Beaver" is an imperfect movie with an imperfect star, Mel Gibson. But the film rises above its shortcomings to become a genuinely compelling journey of one man's descent into mental instability, and how he rises out of it with the unlikely help of a ratty old hand puppet shaped like a beaver.

Gibson plays Walter Black, CEO of a toy company whose life has come off its rails. He can't even speak to his wife and kids, and mostly dodges work to lay about in bed. But he finds his voice again -- figuratively and literally -- when he starts using the Beaver to speak for him.

Others aren't accepting at first, but when he reveals that it's a prescribed therapeutic tool, people soon accept the reinvigorated Walter, even if he comes with a sidekick straight of bad cable access television.

What I liked most about "The Beaver" -- which combines elements of both tragedy and comedy -- is that it takes real risks. Director (and co-star) Jodie Foster and screenwriter Kyle Killen are working outside of familiar Hollywood tropes, refusing to put the story and characters into neat little boxes.

For example, just Walter seems to have emerged from his swirling vortex of self-hatred, his psyche becomes unhinged again. He does something so extreme, it's likely half the audience will be turned off.

But for those willing to stick it out, "The Beaver" is a redemptive story told with off-kilter charm.

Video extras are a bit on the underwhelming side. The goodies are the same for the DVD and Blu-ray editions.

There's a feature-length commentary by Foster -- which would've been so much more interesting if she could've been paired with Gibson -- a making-of documentary and a handful of deleted scenes.

Movie: 3 stars out of four
Extras: 2.5 tars

Review: "The Beaver"

How wonderfully unexpected "The Beaver" is. Just when you think you've got it figured out, this daring and heartfelt film takes another astonishing turn.

The story of a wasted man who finds he can only talk through a furry hand puppet, it wears the clothes of a comedy, but there are sequences of the blackest moods imaginable. Audiences will be kept reeling, not knowing when to laugh and when to bask in the solemn weight of tragedy.

At the screening I attended, the same scene often produced the opposite reaction in different people. Normally I cringe when people guffaw at what is clearly intended to be a serious moment, but with "The Beaver" I didn't mind because the movie's appeal is centered in its ambiguity.

It's hardly a perfect film. Surprisingly, because it's directed by a woman, Jodie Foster, the female characters seemed underwritten, existing mostly to facilitate the emotional journey of the males in their lives. And the film makes a sudden left turn near the end that I know is going to alienate half the audience.

All I can say is it was a thrilling experience to go into a movie without any notion where it was headed. In an era of safe filmmaking with stories and characters tied in uniformly neat bows, "The Beaver" operates outside the box ... and then it kicks the box down the street.

The film's unruly success is anchored by its wayward star, Mel Gibson. I know, we're all legally required to hate Mel these days, because some hateful stuff spills out of him in unguarded moments. To quote Captain Renault from "Casablanca," I'm shocked, shocked to discover that human frailties exist among the above-the-title folks.

Other Hollywood icons have abused their children, like Joan Crawford, or drugged and sodomized a 13-year-old, like Roman Polanski. Even Charlie Chaplin had an insatiable desire for underage girls (even if he often ended up marrying them). Yet I still watch their movies and am transported above the sulfurous bile of their earthly failings.

In Gibson's case, his recent notoriety actually ends up helping the movie. The screenplay -- an original (in the truest sense of that word) by rookie Kyle Killen -- starts right off with Walter Black (Gibson) already down in his pit of despair. We don't really know how he got to the bottom, but Gibson's troubles act as a shorthand for the self-loathing descent he obviously experienced.

Walter is the CEO of Jerry Co., a floundering toy manufacturer. He cannot speak to his wife Meredith (Foster) or their sons, young Henry (Riley Thomas Stewart) and high school senior Porter (Anton Yelchin). Or really summon the energy to do anything but sleep.

Finally kicked out by Meredith, he discovers a frayed old beaver hand puppet in a dumpster and puts it on. Awaking from a stupor the next morning, he finds the puppet talking to him in a low-rent British accent (I thought of Ray Winstone). He introduces himself as The Beaver and tells Watler he's here "to save your miserable life."

Soon Walter and The Beaver have reunited with the family, and everything's hunky-dory again. Meredith is a little put off by the puppet at first, but when Walter produces a card from his psychiatrist authorizing it as therapy, she's thrilled to have her husband back again.

Not so much Porter, who so despises his dad he compiles a list of the similarities he shares with him, which he keeps as a list of shame. Porter has a side business writing term papers for classmates, and is gobsmacked when the cheerleader valedictorian (Jennifer Lawrence) taps him to craft a graduation speech for him.

I don't want to give away any more, because the film's serendipity is its main charm. "The Beaver" always kept me guessing, and even though it ventures into places some people may not like, I respect it as an exercise in genuinely brave movie-making.

3 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Contact"

Yes, I know "Contact" came out in 1997, and a movie a mere dozen years old could not possibly be categorized as a classic. But the name of the column is "Reeling Backward," and I'm the one writing it, so I get to decide how far backward we reel. In this case, not so much. Still, I think enough time has passed to offer a little perspective on this film.

"Contact" was considered a major disappointment at the time, but I really like the movie. It's based on the Carl Sagan novel about mankind's first contact with alien intelligence. Jodie Foster plays a willful scientist who first detects the signal, and is eventually selected to be the one transported halfway across the universe to meet them.

"Contact" has become a touchstone in pop culture references -- and not in a good way. There's a segment of "Family Guy" where Stewie has a lengthy exchange with Matthew McConaughey, where he insults McConaughey's acting skills in general and his role in "Contact" in particular. He alleges that McConaughey's character has no purpose for being in the film. In his best surfer-Texas-dudespeak, McConaughey agrees, and says the producers just wanted a good-looking guy to balance out Jodie Foster and all the science-y stuff.

Much ridicule has also been made of a major plot point in the film where the huge machine that has been built at the direction of the alien message is blown up by religious extremists, and it's revealed that a second identical machine has been secretly built. I admit it does seem a little deux ex machina, but don't blame director Robert Zemeckis and his screenwriters -- it's right there in Carl Sagan's book. In fact, in the book a total of three machines are built. The American one gets destroyed, the Russian one is plagued by construction problems, and the Japanese one is built at the behest of S.R. Hadden (John Hurt), a renegade billionaire who likes to thumb his nose at the powers that be.

I recently re-read Sagan's novel, and I have to say that as imaginative as I think it is, the TV astronomer was a better scientist than he was a storyteller. The book is dense with technical jargon, and often seems more interested in the hows and wherefores of inter-galactic communication and transportation than the implications of it, and certainly the visceral impact.

This is a rare case where the movie is better than the book.

Foster's character, Ellie Arroway, is much feistier and more confrontational than her literary counterpart. Again, this makes sense -- a movie protagonist can't be passive. Audiences want to see the heroine stand up for herself.

There's also much more made of Arroway's personal ambitions in the film version. There's a great scene where she is attending the presidential news conference announcing the reception of the message from another planet, and she is shunted aside for David Drumlin, a bureaucratic nemesis who had in fact been trying to shut down Arroway's project on the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI). For the movie, it makes sense -- conflict is the primary source of drama in most movies. Watch almost any serious film, and some heads are going to be butted.

The movie diverges from the book in ways small and large. The McConaughey character, Palmer Joss, is a religious figure whose print role is quite different. He's heard but not seen to a much greater degree -- and he certainly isn't a romantic partner for Arroway. There's some hint of a connection, but it's more intellectual/philosophical than sexual. She has another boyfriend in the form of the presidential science advisor, which peters out as the machine project nears culmination.

One of the biggest changes is that Arroway is the only person selected to enter the Machine, as it's known, for whatever purpose the aliens have intended for it. But in the book, there are five travelers, representing a geographically and ethnically diverse stratum of humanity. I can see why Zemeckis and his writers went this way -- you'd have to essentially introduce four more important characters right as the movie was entering its third act, which violates some kind of Hollywood dictum or something.

It would also weaken the film's resolution, in which Arroway is held up as a hoaxer. She travels for 18 hours through a series of wormholes, and communicates with a leader of the alien consortium who has taken on the form of her long-dead father. But she's returned at the exact moment she left, so to the observers on the ground nothing happened. There's a nefarious politician, played by James Woods, who leads the inquisition against Arroway, portraying her as an unwitting dupe of the trickster Hadden. Now, it's easy to convince the world that one person had a hallucination, but nearly impossible to make it stick when five people have the same experience.

The one major problem I have with the film, and the book, is the truncated meeting with the aliens. In both cases, the father figure (played by David Morse in the movie) keeps pressing Arroway for time, saying she has to return soon. Basically, she shows up on this alien world, after the nations of earth have spent trillions of dollars building the machine(s), and the essence of their communication is: "Hey. Nice to meetcha. Gotta go now." When Arroway presses him why she can't stay and ask more questions, the answer is that "This is how it's always been done." That's a frustrating non-answer, whether you're reading a book or watching a movie.

But despite its public reception, I feel "Contact" remains one of the best cinematic representations of human interaction with extra-terrestrial life. After all, in a space as vast as our universe, contact is more likely to happen through electronic messages than a flying saucer touching down, a hatch popping open and some green men emerging. The "War of the Worlds" version may sell more tickets, but "Contact" aims a little higher.

3.5 stars