It’s a good thing “It” became a smash hit, since now no one even cares to remember the much more hyped adaptation of another Stephen King work released just over a couple of months ago. “The Dark Tower” crashed and burned at theaters and got savaged by critics and fans of the sprawling series of novels.
Color me the contrarian, but I actually enjoyed it well enough. It’s a bit of a narrative mess and the action scenes don’t always play. But Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey are compelling as eternal enemies playing out the end of a long string of hostilities that cross eons and universes.
Elba plays Roland Deschain, the last Gunslinger -- semi-mystical warriors who battle the Man in Black (McConaughey), a sorcerer/tool of evil who’s trying to topple the Dark Tower that protects the multiverse from utter destruction. (What he gets out of this, it’s never made clear.)
The Dark Tower books are unread by me, but from what I’ve gathered this story takes place outside of and possibly after the events depicted there, as essentially the endgame King never got around to writing himself. Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinker, Anders Thomas Jensen and Nikolaj Arcel form the screenwriting committee, with Arcel also directing.
Tom Taylor plays Jake, the classic alienated/gifted youngster who serves as our eyes and ears into this world. He stumbles across a portal that transports him into the Gunslinger’s realm, Mid-World, where they soon hook up and start to bring the fight to the MiB.
I think people who haven’t read the books are more likely to enjoy “The Dark Tower” than those who did. It’s an intriguing blend of fantasy, Western, science fiction and horror elements. It’s an off-brand gumbo with a few sour bites, but I appreciated the bold mix of divergent ingredients.
Plus, I’m in the school of thought that there’s always something worth watching about any performance by Idris Elba. And that McConaughey guy ain’t half bad, either.
Bonus features are OK. They include several deleted scenes, a blooper real, three vignettes that peer deeper into the Dark Tower mythology and five making-of featurettes.
Matthew McConaughey goes Full Skeeze in “Gold,” a little-seen drama that came out near the end of 2016 and didn’t generate the awards buzz hoped for.
He plays Kenny Wells, a has-been/never-was mining prospector at the end of his rope who stumbles across a massive gold deposit in the deepest jungles of Indonesia. The story is loosely based on David Walsh, CEO of Bre-X, whose gold strike was found to be fraudulent back in the 1990s. Tens of billions of dollars in company value went up in smoke overnight.
McConaughey, not long removed from the skeletal figure he struck in his Oscar-winning turn in “Dallas Buyers Club,” spreads an impressive middle-aged paunch to go along with a scanty head of hair, hollow eyes and a mouthful of crooked teeth. Kenny is perpetually sweating and shifty-eyed, the sort of guy who makes others uncomfortable just by walking in the room.
As the story opens, his company is about to go belly-up. His long-suffering girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard) seems to have half a foot out the door. But Kenny learns about Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramirez), a geologist who’s come up with a new system for finding mineral deposits that the rest of the industry has scoffed at.
Crabbing together his last few bucks and corralling a few investors, they do some exploratory drilling deep in the bush. Soon they’re just about out of money, the local workers flee the mine and Kenny nearly succumbs to dysentery. But his faith in Michael is unshakeable and, improbably, it bears fruit when soil samples reveal gold.
Soon the big moneymen (Corey Stoll among them), who had previously written off the flimflam man, come begging for some of the crumbs to fall from Kenny’s plate. And Bruce Greenwood plays the cutthroat competitor maneuvering to take it all away.
Directed by Stephen Gaghan (“Syriana”) from a script by John Zinman and Patrick Massett, “Gold” barely made a ripple at the box office. But it’s a worthy film, if a bit overly familiar in its themes, cemented by McConoughey’s fully invested performance.
Inside every slick Wall Street high-roller, like the one McConaughey played in “Wolf of Wall Street,” there’s a hungry scrounger fighting for wealth and respect.
Bonus features are pretty good, and are the same for Blu-ray and DVD editions. They include one deleted sequence, feature commentary by director Gaghan and three making-of featurettes: “The Origins of Gold,” “The Locations of Gold” and “Matthew McConaughey as Kenny Wells.”
That was the three-word review provided by a pal who saw the movie before me, and it sums up “Sing” better than I could.
This is a breezy, glitzy animated jukebox show in which movie stars play singing critters getting together for a big talent competition. It will probably win with most children, especially those who like pop songs and want to hear Reese Witherspoon, Scarlett Johansson and the like belting them out through the mouths of pigs and porcupines.
Grownups may find it a bit tedious -- I came awfully close to catching a few Zzzs during our screening -- but it builds a good head of steam toward a showstopper finale.
Written and directed by Garth Jennings, who also provides the voices of one of the minor characters, “Sing” is set in an all-animal metropolis very much like the one in “Zootopia,” where humans are neither seen nor heard, and may not even exist in this world. (Christophe Lourdelet is co-director.)
Matthew McConaughey, who turns out to be a real vocal chameleon between this and his voice acting in “Kubo and the Two Strings,” plays Buster Moon. He’s a koala bear charlatan who runs a grand old theater that’s had one big failure after another.
McConaughey plays Moon light and schmaltzy, employing the upper register of his voice without a hint of that famous Texas drawl. Moon is an old-school “let’s put on a show” type with a heart of gold, but isn’t above stiffing contractors and a dab of flim-flam.
With the bank threatening repossession, he comes up with an idea for a huge singing contest using local unknowns. Scraping together his last bit of cash, he instructs his elderly iguana secretary to put out flyers advertising a $1,000 prize, but through some slapstick action it gets turned into $100,000. Soon every critter in town who thinks they can warble worth a darn is beating down his door.
McConaughey doesn’t get past humming, but there is a great deal of singing, both old standards and a few new tunes. Some of the actors we already knew could sing -- Johansson, Seth MacFarlane. But it’s a treat to hear Reese Witherspoon, as hectored porcine housewife Rosita, fry up some bacon and serve it with style.
Pop singer Tori Kelly plays Meena, an elephant who takes a job as stagehand because she’s too shy to show her talent. Johansson is Ash, a surly teen porcupine rocker who gets to step out of the shadow of her controlling boyfriend. MacFarlane voices Mike, a streetwise mouse who dresses, behaves and sings like he stepped right out of Sinatra’s Rat Pack.
The real sensation is Taron Egerton, the affable Brit you may remember from “Eddie the Eagle” and “Kingsman: The Secret Service.” He plays Johnny, a Cockney gorilla who comes from a clan of career criminals, and doesn’t want to follow in the family footsteps. Egerton’s got some truly golden pipes, soft and silky.
There’s really not a whole lot of narrative ambition to “Sing.” Each character has a mini arc to travel along, and we know where they’re going to land two minutes after we meet them. But the songs are nice to listen to, the creatures are crazy cute and your kids will be entertained for 108 minutes.
“Kubo and the Two Strings” is my favorite animated film of 2016 so far, but it didn’t fare very well at the box office. I think people may have seen a story set in medieval Japan and dismissed it as anime. (Which in of itself is a terrible reason to avoid a movie.) So I’m genuinely hoping people will check it out on video, so more flicks like “Kubo” will be made.
Art Parkinson provides the voice of Kubo, a boy filled with loneliness and magic. With only one eye and a banjo, he trudges into town every day to spin his fantastic tales for the villagers, complete with sheets of paper that come to life, then returns to his seaside cave to care for his mother. A sorceress who fought a terrible long-ago battle with her own family, she’s nearly catatonic – but still has some magic up her sleeve
Later, Kubo is banished to the distant Farlands, placed on a quest to gather three mystic pieces of armor in order to take on the evil Moon King (Ralph Fiennes) – who happens to be his own grandfather. His aunts, known as the Sisters (Rooney Mara), are fearsome witches on the hunt.
Kubo’s only companions are Monkey (Charlize Theron), a protective charm brought to life as be his guardian, and Beetle (Matthew McConaughey), a cursed former samurai trapped in the body of a bug.
The stop-motion animation is just astonishing, with a battle with a giant skeleton standing out especially. The depictions of ocean waves and crackling magic are astonishingly life-like.
Director Travis Knight and screenwriters Chris Butler and Marc Haimes continue the fine tradition of stop-motion animation – “Coraline,” “The Boxtrolls,” “The Night Before Christmas” – that’s seen a terrific run the last couple of decades.
Go see/rent/buy “Kubo and the Two Strings,” and let’s keep this ball rolling.
Bonus features are quite good, including a feature-length commentary track with Knight. The Blu-ray and DVD editions also come with three making-of documentaries, focusing the Japanese inspiration for the story, varied landscapes and the mythology behind Kubo.
Upgrade to the 3D combo pack and you add five more featurettes, including ones on monsters and music.
I think I was about halfway through the screening of “Kubo
and the Two Strings” before I even realized it was stop-motion animation. The
movement is so smooth, the backgrounds so dense and the action so unbound, I
figured there was no way this could be the work of puppets slowly moved a frame
at a time.
But Laika, the stop-motion studio behind “The Boxtrolls,” “ParaNorman”
and “Coraline,” has made another gem with this lyrical story set in medieval
Japan.
It’s about a boy, Kubo (voice of Art Parkinson), who has
grown up as a virtual orphan near a tiny beach village. He lives in a cave with
his mother, who exists in a seemingly never-ending daze, needing help even to eat.
But in her more lucid moments she spins tales about the dark history of their
family, including the death of his father, Honsou, a mighty warrior, and how as
a baby Kubo had one of his eyes stolen by his own grandfather.
(Though the material is carefully presented not to be too
frightening, the themes and action scenes may be too intense for smaller
children. I would take my 5-year-old to see this, but probably not the
3-year-old.)
Kubo has inherited the magical gift of his mother, which he employs
to tell variations on his mother’s stories in the village for money. Using a
traditional three-string Japanese banjo, plinked with a triangular pick, and
colored paper that comes alive at his beckon to turn into shape-shifting origami
to illustrate his tales, it’s an astonishing blend of dazzling visuals and jaunty
music. (Dario Marianelli provides the latter.)
Tragedy befalls when Kubo ignores his mother’s warning to
never remain outside after sunset, when his grandfather, the Moon King (Ralph
Fiennes), can see him. The boy finds himself exiled to the barren Farlands. His
only companion is Monkey (Charlize Theron), a wooden charm he always carried
that came alive via his mother’s spells. Monkey is very protective of the boy,
and sternly urges him on his quest to retrieve the three pieces of magical
armor necessary to defeat the enemy.
Along the way they encounter the Sisters, very creepy masked
twins who are a disturbing amalgam of Japanese and European conceptions of
witches, both voiced by Rooney Mara. They also run into this odd creature who
looks like a man trapped inside a bug’s chitinous shell; he has no memory,
other than insisting he was once a samurai who was cursed. Dubbing the forgetful
fellow Beetle (Matthew McConaughey), he joins their little band.
The animation is just wondrous to behold. Several ocean
scenes have a mesmerizing quality, especially once you realize there’s no water
used. One encounter with a giant skeleton is particularly memorable, both for
its fearfulness and intricacy.
“Kubo and the Two Strings” is not your typical animated
flick. Though it’s suitable for (nearly) the whole family, it’s got an edge and
a timelessness that goes far beyond the familiar cute-critters-and-life-lessons
formula. It feels like an ageless Eastern parable, dreamed up by 21st
century American artists.
“If you must blink, do it now!” Kubo invokes at the
beginning of each of his tales. Even a wink is too much magic to be missed.
Some people were fascinated by “Interstellar,” Christopher Nolan’s ruminative space adventure, while others were simply bewildered. Count me as both.
The film, which Nolan directed and co-wrote, is at once very science-heavy and dreamy. It uses the mechanics of space exploration to tell a humanist tale about parents and children, reaching for the stars versus keeping your head on the ground, and other big-think topics.
Matthew McConaughey plays an engineer/pilot who’s been grounded by an ecosystem disaster that’s destroying all of mankind’s crops. The human race will eventually starve. He’s offered a chance to lead a last-ditch mission to find a way to save the species by traveling through a wormhole to distant galaxies.
It seems other astronauts were dispatched on similar trips years ago and never returned. So it’s a high-risk/high-reward situation.
Anne Hathaway is the doubting Thomas co-pilot, while Jessica Chastain plays McConaughey’s daughter. If the age difference between Chastain and McConaughey doesn’t sound plausible, that’s because in different parts of space time can flow much faster – meaning years pass by while they’re dawdling on a lonely planet.
The visual majesty of how Nolan and his crew depict inter-dimensional travel is just mind-blowing. I wish I could say the same about the soundscape, which in a typically Nolan-like way with a thrumming musical score by Hans Zimmer, makes it very hard to make out dialogue at times. You may remember having similar difficulty understanding Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises.”
(Of course, now you can just turn on subtitles during those hard-to-decipher scenes to see what McConaughey was really saying. I’m taking bets on whether it was actually anything substantive, or if he was just muttering something about Earth chicks getting older while he stays the same.)
In the end it’s just well-crafted sound and fury signifying not much, but “Interstellar” is certainly never boring.
The film is being released with a host of goodies, though you’ll have to pay for the Blu-ray edition to get any of them: the DVD comes with exactly nothing.
Extras include interviews with the cast and crew reflecting on the filmmaking experience, and a ton of making-of featurettes touching on virtually every aspect of production. This includes the real science behind space travel, shooting in Iceland to replicate a desolate planet, concept art and much more.
"Interstellar" sure is an odd, dense, occasionally brilliant and occasionally maddening cinematic experience. The latest from director Christopher Nolan continues the mind-trippyness of "Inception" and marries it with an outer space story about astronauts from Earth exploring other galaxies and dimensions, in between disastrous explosions and human frailty.
It wants to be the thematic and aesthetic inheritor to "2001: A Space Odyssey" but registers several orders of magnitude lower on the scale of worthiness. It plays out as one long (nearly three-hour) space ride with a lot of mind-boggling science and pseudo-science mixed into the humanist blender.
The movie never failed to engage me, but it didn't leave me very satisfied, either. Nolan and his cast and crew get the quantum mechanics of their space tale right, but the human element never makes it off the launch pad.
The story -- Nolan and his brother, Jonathan, wrote the screenplay -- is set in a typically vague near-future where things have gone awry for humanity. An agricultural blight is wiping out the Earth's crops one by one, and dust storms blow in from time to time like biblical revelations.
Cooper (Matt McConaughey) is a pilot/engineer-turned farmer. There's not much use for science guys these days, just those who make food. Cooper resents the way humanity has bookended its ambitions -- we're supposed to be explorers and pioneers, he laments on his dirt-caked porch, not tenders of sod. His son, Tom, embraces the agrarian future but his 10-year-old daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), dreams the dreams of her father.
Through a quick, not entirely coherent succession of expository scenes, Cooper is recruited to lead a NASA mission that represents humanity's last hope. It seems a stable wormhole opened up near Saturn 50 years ago. Previous astronauts were sent through to scout out a habitable new home world for the species. Cooper and his crew, chiefly Anne Hathaway as astrophysicist Dr. Brand, are supposed to link up with them.
The space travel scenes, through wormholes and gravitational slingshots and whatnot, are transcendently beautiful and awe-inspiring. Aided by Hoyte Van Hotema's cinematography and the familiar pounding musical score of Hans Zimmer, Nolan has captured the notion of space wrapping in itself in an ingenious way previously unseen on the big screen.
I won't give away too much about what they find on the other side, other than to say the passage of time is a primary consideration. The theory of relativity states that time travels at different speeds depending on where you are, so the team must complete their quest before everyone on Earth starves. Meanwhile, Cooper frets upon the children he left behind, who transmit video messages into the ether they aren't sure if he'll ever see. (Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck play them as adults.)
Unfortunately, the Nolans' script suffers from similarity lapses in relativity, though on the narrative rather than the temporal plane. The story races ahead heedlessly at times, testing the audience's ability to keep up based on half-garbled dialogue. Then it will go into a slow spin, as the characters get all moony and contemplative, and we wish they'd fire up the jets or blow a hatch, or something.
(I should also mention I often had difficulty hearing the dialogue -- not understanding it, but just hearing it. I'm not sure if was the speaker system in the theater or the film's sound mix, but Zimmer's music blasts at you in waves of organ chords that overpower the actors' voices like lily pads caught in a tidal wave.)
There's power and majesty in "Interstellar," but also smallness and limitation. The film's sheer grandiosity serves to expose its inability to coherently line up the X-Y-Zs of its plot. Nolan & Co. aim for the stars, quite literally, and if they don't reach them they provide us enough of a glimpse to leave us dazzled and befuddled. It's like being knocked out of your regular orbit, teetering off to points unknown.
“No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough,” wrote Roger Ebert. I don’t entirely agree – I’ve seen plenty of worthy films that could’ve been improved with a nip and a tuck. Case in point: “The Wolf of Wall Street,” at 180 minutes, is occasionally self-indulgent and sprawling.
But it’s still a terrific film, one of the best of 2013. My guess is that people who were put off from seeing it in theaters due to its three-hour run time will cozy up to the latest handsome collaboration between Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, their fifth together, now that it’s out on video.
DiCaprio plays Jordan Belfort, a slick young stock broker who founds an investment firm dedicated to partying hard and snorting up commission fees from clients on questionable deals. Along with a handful of sycophantic collaborators, including a giddy Jonah Hill as his wingman, they set about to take Wall Street by storm.
This they do – but attracting the attentions of certain lawmen in the process. Jordan & Co. spend as much time hiding their antics from the public eye as they do chasing the almighty dollar.
“Wolf” careens all over the place between comedy and drama, cautionary tale and generous helpings of sex ‘n’ drugs. Much as Scorsese has often been accused of idolizing the gangsters so often featured in his movies, there’s no denying this film gleefully dives into a pool of debauchery.
It may be kind of a mess, and would probably be better if it were 15 or 20 minutes shorter, but it’s still one terrific cinematic ride.
Video features are a big disappointment. If you buy the DVD version, you get absolutely nothing – not even a theatrical trailer.
Spring for the Blu-ray combo pack and you add only “The Wolf Pack” – a series of interviews with Scorsese, cast and crew about making the film.
Has any actor ever squandered his career with better efficiency than Matthew McConaughey, then reclaimed it with such a superior run of movies? The former star of “Failure to Launch” has had one terrific role after another as of late, capped off by an Oscar-nominated performance in “Dallas Buyers Club.”
He plays Ron Woodruff, a real-life Texas playboy who in 1985 discovered he was carrying the HIV virus. In a time and a place where that meant automatic ostracism from his crowd of good-ole-boy buddies, Ron became a pioneer in smuggling non-legalized drugs into the U.S. to help a clientele of mostly homosexual and transgender men cling to life.
McConaughey and co-star Jared Leto, who plays a transvestite hooker, Rayon, who becomes Ron’s partner in crime, both starved themselves to the point of emaciation for their roles. There’s no vanity in these transformations, however, as the actors barely even resemble themselves.
Ron and Rayon become unlikely friends, a relationship at first based on convenience but eventually on trust and genuine warmth.
“Dallas Buyers Club” is a terrific, somber and enlightening look at a period in history where people forced to the margins of society had to look out for each other -- by any means necessary.
Alas, video extras are rather scant, with only a few deleted scenes and a making-of featurette.
If it seems like "The Wolf of Wall Street" bears more than a passing resemblance to Martin Scorsese's masterpiece "Goodfellas," that's because it does. Both films follow similar themes in relating a first-person account of a young guy who stumbled into way more wealth and power than he deserved, and how he set about squandering it.
For Henry Hill, the mafia was his ladder up to the stratosphere of egomania and drug abuse; for Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), it was the stock market.
This mostly-true story, based on Belfort's own book of the same title and translated by screenwriter Terence Winter, is a bacchanalia of drugs, hubris and debauchery. At three hours, it's a sprawling, untidy film that nevertheless often flirts with brilliance.
Tonally, the movie wanders this way and that, from raucous comedy to straight drama to fizzy caper and eventually into tragedy. But rather than being a film that seemingly can't decide what it wants to be, "Wolf" just opted to be everything at once -- and does a very good job at it.
Set in the late 1980s and 1990s, the story follows Belfort as he rises (or descends, depending on your perspective) in the world of stock trading. Wiped out as a young broker in the crash of '87, he latches onto the penny stock market, where the values are tiny but the potential for huge commissions is like dripping red meat to a slavering, greedy talent like himself.
Recruiting some of his buddies -- including a spot-on Jonah Hill as Donnie Azoff, his veneer-wearing, sycophantic right-hand man -- Jordan founds Stratton Oakmont, a firm with a name designed to appeal to old-money types who normally wouldn't have anything to do with shady characters like themselves.
It's an overnight success, and they start attracting a lot of attention for their wild spending and frat-boy antics. Such as the dwarf-tossing competition that first opens the movie, where Jordan throws $25,000 in cash on the ground as a bet.
Eventually, his operation attracts the notice of a dogged FBI investigator (Kyle Chandler) and the SEC. Jordan makes a show of wising up, even hiring his father (Rob Reiner) to be the office watchdog. He marries a beautiful model, Naomi, whom he dubs the Duchess of his sprawling empire, and then uses her poorly. She's played by Margot Robbie, who in the tradition of Scorsese leading ladies has a sweet exterior covering up a hard-bitten core.
Rounding out the cast are Jon Bernthal as a street thug Jordan sometimes uses for muscle; Jean Dujardin as a slimy Swiss banker; Joanna Lumley as Naomi's somewhat helpful British aunt; and Ethan Suplee, Kenneth Choi and Barry Rothbart as Jordan's lunkhead recruits.
Matthew McConaughey has a brief, kooky but delicious cameo as a seasoned broker who first instructs Jordan in what it takes to be successful in the stock trading game -- in short, a total disregard for others plus astonishing quantities of cocaine.
And there is plenty of both depicted in the movie. Scorsese has been criticized throughout his career for his reliance on violence, but with "Wolf" he trades in the gore for debauchery. He flaunts the sex-and-drugs material with the same relish he previously showed in beating people to a bloody pulp. There's enough nudity and kinky sex here to give "Blue Is the Warmest Color" a run for the title of most explicit Oscar contender this year.
Holding it all together is DiCaprio in his second magnificent performance of 2013, along with "The Great Gatsby." Callous yet charismatic, Jordan is a Quaalude-dropping, prostitute-hording, filthy-mouthed messiah to those who follow him. Making money is their first, and only priority in life. That, and a good party.
While some might be put off by the length and subject matter of “The Wolf of Wall Street,” it’s another career high point for both Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, and one of the year’s finest films. I’m betting they just might work together again, if they can pay dividends as good as these.
Ron Woodruff doesn’t look like a hero. He doesn’t sound like one, either, and in fact does a whole lot of irresponsible and even hateful stuff. When we first meet him it’s apparent he’s particularly not fond of gay people, using the f-word freely -- though this wasn’t really unusual in Texas in 1985, when the AIDs epidemic had finally rolled out into mainstream consciousness.
Yet Ron, for all his many, many faults, did something that was downright heroic. He smuggled in drugs for HIV-positive patients that had not yet been approved by the FDA, saving countless lives. He did it to save his own skin and make money, so it’s not unfair to call him a drug smuggler -- of non-legalized (as opposed to illegal) pharmaceuticals.
The movie about his story, “Dallas Buyers Club,” is easily one of the best of the year, a touching story that never slides into self-indulgence and pap.
But let’s get back to how Ron looks, because it’s a sight. And that means talking about the appearance of Matthew McConaughey, who portrays Ron. The actor, whom it would be fair to say glided for years based on his good looks, has lost so much weight, he’s beyond thin. He’s downright frightening to look at.
All of McConaughey’s movie-star vanity is gone here. His face has caved in, those prominent cheekbones standing out like a pair of lonely buttes on the wide Texas plains. The rippling arms and legs have become withered twigs, the sculpted abs fallen in on themselves. He makes the scrawny guy in those old Charles Atlas muscle ads seem well-fed.
“As wiry as an ocotillo,” a reporter once described Ron, referring to the scraggly desert plant. That’s about right. He walks around with a foot of extra belt hanging off his jeans from being cinched ever further.
When he’s injured on the job as an electrician, Ron can’t believe it when the doctors tell him he’s tested HIV-positive. Not even when they tell him his T-cell count, normally between 500 and 1,500, is seven. “Frankly, we’re surprised you’re even alive,” the doc says.
Given 30 days to live, Ron goes through the stages of grief at lightspeed. Rejected by his roughneck buddies, who cannot gather how anyone but a homosexual could contract the disease, he tries to get into a drug trial for AZT. A compassionate doctor (Jennifer Garner) tries unsuccessfully to help him, but he scores some through the black market, though the drug only seems to make him weaker.
Arriving on the doorstep of a quack former doctor in Mexico (Griffin Dunne), Ron learns that there are other drugs available to effectively treat symptoms of HIV/AIDS -- they just haven’t been approved by the FDA. After recovering with the help of this medicine, he makes it his mission to smuggle these into America and make a killing off keeping others alive.
Since his market is (at this stage of the disease) almost entirely gay men, Ron finds that a homophobic, foul-mouthed cowboy like himself has troubles making inroads to this clientele. So he enlists the aid of Rayon, a transvestite prostitute played by Jared Leto.
Leto and McConaughey both deserve Oscar nominations for their performances, especially after witnessing the slow dance toward trust and understanding their two characters undertake. Leto, starved almost to the same proportions as McConaughey, is like a warped latter-day version of Norma Desmond, the fallen star from “Sunset Boulevard.” Rayon desperately clings to the belief she deserves better than what she’s gotten out of life, both her body and her circumstance, and it gives her a sort of vainglorious grace.
Eventually the feds arrive to shut down the party, as they did with dozens of other “buyers clubs” that sprung up around the country in the mid-1980s to sell non-approved HIV medicine. (The scam to get around FDA rules was that the drugs were free, as long as you buy a “membership” in the club.) The movie bogs down a little here, as screenwriters Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack focus too much on the legal shenanigans.
Mostly, “Dallas Buyers Club” is a showcase for the long-dormant talents of Matthew McConaughey, who broke onto the Hollywood scene as “the next Paul Newman,” then lost his way with conceited roles in movies dreamed up by accountants rather than artists. Based on this extraordinary film and “Mud,” he’s ready to shoulder that heavy mantle again.
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.
I'm not going to lie: I went into this movie kind of expecting to loathe it. But Jean wanted to see it, and now that I'm not playing World of Warcraft I have to find ways to fill my evenings, so off we went to the promo screening.
I was pleasantly surprised. The last few Matthew McConaughey romantic comedies have been just terrible, to the point that I avoided "Fool's Gold" like the plague (along with, apparently, most everyone else). "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" actually manages quite a few laughs, some genuinely tender moments in the latter half, and to keep McConaughey's dude-ish acting tendencies in check.
Perhaps I shouldn't have been shocked, since upon looking over the film's credits I see that the director is Mark Waters, who made the wonderful "Mean Girls" a few years ago.
The story is a takeoff on the old Ebenezer Scrooge tale. Instead of being a miserly old businessman, McConaughey is Connor Mead, a celebrity photographer and the ultimate ladies' man. That term, ladies' man, is perhaps not the most suitable, since Connor most definitely belongs to himself and no one else. He has had hundreds of girlfriends, most of them for just a few weeks, and juggles them so capriciously that in one of the movie's early scenes he breaks up with three of them at once via video conference call. The man is efficient, if nothing else.
Connor is following in the footsteps of his Uncle Wayne, played as a ghostly apparition by Michael Douglas, decked out in perpetual sunglasses and slicked-back hairdo a la Robert Evans. Uncle Wayne got filthy rich, built a mansion and drove a Cadillac with a license plate that says "Stabbin' Wagon." Now he's returned from the grave to show Connor the error of his ways, via visits from ghosts representing girlfriends past, present and future.
Emma Stone has a hilarious turn as the first ghost, who wears braces and disturbingly accurate '80s garb. She was Connor's first conquest as a teen, and she takes him on a journey though all the women he's hurt.
At first, Connor misses the point of the exercise, such as when he watches the scenes of Uncle Wayne (not the ghost, a flashback of the real thing) tutoring him how to use and dispose of women. "The man was a legend," Connor remarks with awe. "Do you know he invented the term, 'milf'?"
But eventually Connor learns that he's spent his life hiding from pain, chiefly in the form of Jenny Perotti (Jennifer Garner, doing a lot with an underwritten role), the girl he grew up with and was dumped by. Jenny and Connor are both in the wedding party of his brother, which is a huge opportunity for Connor to drink too much, decry the value of marriage, and chase a little bridesmaid tail.
One of the things that I liked most about the movie is that it is self-aware. It knows the constraints of the romcom genre, and happily acknowledges and comments upon them. For example, at one point Emma Stone's ghosts introduces the next scene: "Now we're going to watch a romantic montage of you and Jenny set to Cyndi Lauper's 'Time After Time.'"
Who would have guessed that "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" would be the best movie coming out on May 1?
