Review: "The Dinner"

Not since “My Dinner with Andre” has a meal seemed so full of portents and human collateral.

“The Dinner,” an intimate drama from writer/director Oren Moverman (“The Messenger”), gathers two brothers and their wives at one of those ridiculous “food art” restaurants for an encounter heavy with familial secrets and strife. Old grudges will be picked over, resentments stoked and then cooled, political ambitions balanced upon the edge of a knife, the future of young lives quarreled over.

Quite literally, by the time the check comes, the guests’ lives will be changed.

It’s a terrific ensemble cast: Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Rebecca Hall. There’s no true main character, though Steve Coogan serves as the locus of events as Paul Lohman. He’s a former high school history teacher, a hyper-intelligent man who lives deeply inside his own mind, while struggling to relate to anyone on the outside.

Even as he’s interacting with other people -- usually awkwardly -- Coogan’s narration gives us a taste of the constant internal monologue spinning inside his brain, generally involving a mix of Civil War lore and a desperate nihilism about the fate of mankind.

Just about the only one who can reach him is his wife, Claire (Linney), a doctor who applies her great bedside manner to soothing her anxious, uppity mate. We watch her and admire the force of her presence, the beatific way she seems to calm everyone around her, the anchor amidst a sea of tumult.

Later, we’ll find reason to amend our opinion of her.

Gere is Stan Lohman, a Congressman who’s currently the favorite to win the governor’s chair. He’s got a major bill he’s sponsored on tap for a vote tomorrow, and his right-hand woman, Nina (Adepero Oduye), can’t fathom why he’s spending time on a family dinner at a critical juncture. Stan is a politician through-and-through, a clear line that runs through his personal and professional lives: a schmoozer, glad-hander and flimflam man.

But again: down the line, we’ll come to reassess this character.

Rebecca Hall plays Kate, Paul’s self-described “trophy wife,” a much younger and beautiful woman who lends him an air of sophistication and grace. She’s the sort of person people tend to dismiss, and she uses that to bend her environment to her taste.

Chloë Sevigny pops up in flashbacks as Stan’s previous wife, though whether they parted through death or divorce, we know not.

Speaking of flashbacks: there are a lot of them. Based on the novel by Dutch writer Herman Koch, “The Dinner” jumps backward and forward in time with great vigor, to the point we sometimes aren’t sure if what we’re watching came before or after the previous scene. A few changes in hairstyles are our only clue.

But it’s the emotional thread that matters.

Suffice it to say, there was great darkness in the past, and more has arrived on their collective doorstep. I don’t want to say too much, other than it involves their trio of sons: Michael (Charlie Plummer), Paul and Claire’s kid; and Stan’s boys, Rick (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), born to his previous wife, and Beau (Miles J. Harvey), an African-American boy they adopted.

As the dramaturgy unfolds, a parade of fetishized food dishes are presented to them by platoons of waiters, emceed by a host (Michael Chernus) who describes each plate with the overworked prose of a latter-day James Joyce.

(My God, people, it’s food: stick it in your mouth and chew. When you’re hungry again, repeat.)

For a film that’s mostly people sitting and talking, “The Dinner” has an urgent energy about it. We sense that this seemingly ordinary evening will end up as the most important night of their lives. It’s a meal, and a movie, that sizzles.

Video review: "Transcendence"

A box office and critical bomb, “Transcendence” is one of those movies that at least doesn’t suffer from a lack of trying.

This big, ambitious sci-fi thriller starring Johnny Depp posits a world in which artificial intelligence is threatening to take over, with promises of infinite knowledge and immortality -- as long as humans are willing to give up control and subvert their free will.

Depp plays Will Caster, a brilliant scientist who wants to build a sentient computer. He is forced to make himself the subject of his experiment when he is fatally wounded by anti-technology terrorists. With the help of his wife (Rebecca Hall) and reluctant best friend (Paul Bettany), he uploads his consciousness into a super computer.

The recomposed Will spreads across the Internet like a virus, and quickly makes breakthrough discoveries in medicine, energy and nanotechnology. He oversees the construction of a utopia-like town in the desert, and begins conscripting an army of henchmen controlled by his technology.

There are a lot of huge, thoughtful ideas in this movie. The screenplay by Jack Paglan had languished on the Black List of promising but unproduced scripts for years. But first-time director Wally Pfister, a cinematographer by trade, is clearly out of his depth, lacking the storytelling chops to translate such a complex narrative with overarching themes.

In the end, “Transcendence” is a slave to its science fiction tropes, rather than rising above them and giving us something new.

Video extras are OK, though you’ll have to spring for the more expensive Blu-ray combo pack to get most of them. The DVD version contains only two featurettes, “What Is Transcendence?” and “Wally Pfister: A Singular Vision.”

On the Blu-ray you’ll get four more making-of featurettes, and theatrical trailers.

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Video review: "Iron Man 3"

After three outings plus an Avengers tie-in movie, Iron Man is showing his rust.

What once was a fun, zippy roller-coaster ride of a super-hero franchise has quickly devolved into a predictably dark-and-dreary phase. Much like with the last Batman movie, the man behind the mask has grown tired of wearing it, and spends much more time stewing in his personal pit of despair than battling bad guys.

Here Tony Stark is facing confidence problems in the wake of battling aliens, and suffers panic attacks. Robert Downey Jr. still has that rapscallion twinkle in his eye, but he has fewer opportunities to show off his motor-mouth charm.

 Lady love Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) is demanding that he give up the whole super-hero shtick. But with a mysterious terrorist named the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) blowing up stuff all over the world, that isn’t about to happen.

New director Shane Black and screenwriter Drew Pearce opt for the buffet approach to storytelling: throw in a little bit of everything, and hope people find something they like. The result is a hot mess of action scenes, male posturing and political plots.

It’s capped off by a ridiculous finale where Stark summons all forty-odd versions of the Iron Man suit to come fight for him, remotely controlled by computer. If he could do that, why didn’t he roll with an entire platoon of automaton Iron Men wherever he went?

“Iron Man 3” isn’t a bad movie, but clearly the red-and-gold avenger has lost much of his luster.
Video features are quite good, though you’ll have to go for the Blu-ray/DVD edition to get the best stuff. The DVD version has only a making-of documentary and a featurette about shooting the Air Force One scene.

Get the combo upgrade and you add a gag reel, deleted and extended scenes, and a feature-length commentary by writer/director Black and co-screenwriter Pearce. You also get a behind-the scenes sneak peek at “Thor: The Dark World” and an all-new short film featuring S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Carter (Hayley Atwell).

Along with a new TV show, another Captain America flick and the inevitable Avengers sequel, Marvel is building a whole super-universe.

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Review: "Iron Man 3"

"Iron Man" was a zippy, giddy take on the superhero genre, with Robert Downey Jr. as our over-caffeinated but charming stewardess on a cinematic zero-g flight into the stratosphere. Then there was "Iron Man 2" because, well, the laws of economics more or less demanded it, even if it offered audiences little more than an obligatory dark-n-dreary phase.

And then came "The Avengers," the harmonic convergence of several comic book movie franchises, proving that sometimes more is more. Unfortunately, it's left Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, with little reason to keep hanging around in his third solo outing.

Downey is back with that rapscallion twinkle in his eye, his nervous tics and motormouth line delivery revealing a man too smart to be comfortably constrained by the mortal limits of his fleshy cocoon. He quotes an anecdote that Albert Einstein only slept three hours a year, and it's clear from Stark's tone that he begrudges even that much time spent away from his gear-happy lair, tinkering away on never-ending improvements to his array of super-suits.

In his own imitable wobbly way, Stark/Downey is the steadying force that keeps the "Iron Man" movies together.

Unfortunately, director Shane Black, who co-wrote the screenplay with Drew Pearce, have come up with a story that's like a buffet line -- they couldn't really decide on a recipe, so they just threw in a little of everything.

Want more snappy banter between Stark and best friend/security wingman Happy (played by Jon Favreau, former director now demoted to sidekick)? It's there, tiredly. And relationship tensions between him and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), his lady love and now head cheese of Stark Industries? Ditto.

There's also some stuff about the after-effects of Stark's battles with critters from outer space in the Avengers flick, leading to one or two full-out panic attacks. It seems the uber-arrogant playboy/inventor/savior of mankind actually has confidence issues.

"Gods? Aliens? I'm a man in a can," he moans.

The world is being threatened by a mastermind terrorist named the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), who dresses like a pasha and speaks like a Mississippi Baptist preacher while setting off mysterious bombs that leave no trace of their mechanical origin. He being a movie villain, Mandarin has to do this live on TV, hacking every station in the country at once, simultaneously.

Worse yet, the Mandarin apparently has all these strange henchmen who sort of glow red from the inside, can make things extremely hot by touching them and heal amazingly fast.

A few new characters float around the edges. There's Maya (Rebecca Hall), a botanist and former Stark fling who's found a way to "hack the operating system of a creature's DNA," or something. And Aldrich Killian, who we see in a 1999 flashback looking homely and walking with a crutch, who later turns up as handsome as Guy Pearce.

Don Cheadle returns as Jim Rhodes, who wears an older version of Stark's suite and serves the U.S. government as War Machine ... wait, check that, they redub him Iron Patriot after the name tests better with focus groups.

There are a few exciting action sequences, but the overall effect is more discombobulating than exhilarating. Stark jumps from situation to situation, and -- thanks to some new technology -- from suit to suit so quickly, it never really feels like there are real consequences to the mayhem.

Late in the game, Stark narrates a lament about how many geniuses start out with great intentions, but then compromises and complications bring down their best efforts. It's an apt metaphor for super-hero movies, which start out with a cool premise and M.O. Then as time goes by, the mythology gets junked up with tertiary characters and subplots.

Maybe that's why in the comic book world, every so often they reboot a character by returning him or her to their roots, which are reimagined for a fresh start. With "Iron Man 3," they've taken this hardware as far as it can go.

Review: "Everything Must Go"

"Everything Must Go" will quickly be labeled as Will Ferrell's "Punch-Drunk Love," in which juvenile funnyman Adam Sandler went into serious dramatic mode and proved he had real acting chops, when he cared to exercise them.

"Everything" isn't nearly as good and Ferrell doesn't show nearly the range and depth Sandler did. But it's an engaging character study, solidly handled by rookie writer/director Dan Rush, and gives a little insight into the sort of career Ferrell might have had if he hadn't made his bones playing nincompoops and running around bare-assed.

"Everything Must Go" bills itself as a comedy-drama, but there are no laugh-out-loud moments or even wry smiles. The film aims to draw a portrait of human foibles, not puncture them for humorous effect. It's based on a Raymond Carver short story, "Why Don't You Dance," and he wasn't exactly a bundle of mirth.

Let's hope the studio isn't marketing this movie to Ferrell's usual fan base, because the people who enjoyed "Step Brothers" and "Land of the Lost" are going to storm out in a huff. Those who remain, though, will enjoy the film's bittersweet charms.

Ferrell plays Nick Halsey, a veteran salesman having the worst day of his life. He's fired from his well-paying job after his six months of sobriety end in a major relapse on a business trip.

After slashing the tire of his smarmy boss' (Glenn Howerton) car, he loads up on beer and arrives home to find all his possessions moved out onto the front lawn. The locks on the house are changed, and a letter from his wife informs him she's left him. For good measure, his bank account is frozen and his company car is repossessed.

Lacking the means to do much of anything, Nick's ambitions end at getting plastered and camping out in his recliner. (His one bit of fortune is living in Phoenix, where it doesn't rain much or get very cold.)

The irritable next-door neighbor (Stephen Root) complains, and Nick appears about to be run off by the cops, until his friend and AA sponsor Frank Garcia, a police detective, intervenes. Frank gets a permit for a five-day yard sale to get the authorities off his back, after which, Frank promises, he'll come back and arrest Nick himself.

At first humiliated and angry about being a squatter on his own property, Nick soon becomes surly and resentful. He recruits Kenny (a terrific Christopher Jordan Wallace), a clever neighborhood kid left by his mother to his own devices, to coordinate his sale. Of course, he refuses to actually sell anything when made an offer.

Across the street is Samantha (Rebecca Hall), who's just moved in. Nick makes a tepid overture toward friendship, and she reciprocates. She's a photographer waiting for her husband to wrap up his job in New York and join her. But after learning Nick's whole story, she finds herself the target of his less sunny side.

"I'm no different from any of you," Nick insists, indicating the whole neighborhood. "I just don't hide in my house."

"Everything Must Go" has the feel of a short story. The narrative is carefully bookended, so we can only pick up hints of Nick's life prior to meeting him. He was a high school jock with a lousy father. Nick and his (unseen) wife have a serious fascination with Japanese culture, even turning their swimming pool into a koi pond.

And there's even the suggestion that Nick's alcoholic blackouts are more than just binges, but wellsprings of malevolent behavior. When Nick seeks out an old high school acquaintance (Laura Dern) and she tells him he has "a good heart, and that doesn't change," we wonder if she's right.

The problem with Will Ferrell in this role is that his comedic persona is built around presenting a seemingly normal front, showing us the cracks in that quotidian facade, and then gleefully diving into and widening those fissures.

Watching "Everything Must Go," I kept expecting Ferrell to do a double-take and start riffing to the camera. I'm glad he never does, but the fact that we wait for it subtracts from the experience.

3 stars out of four

Video review: "Please Give"

Kate, a thriving New York City businesswoman, offers a man her dinner leftovers, plaintively asking if he is hungry. He is late middle age, African-American, and his clothes have seen better days.

The beatific expression of pity on Kate's face is shattered when the man nods toward the swank restaurant in front of him. "I'm waiting for a table," he says haughtily.

This delicious scene represents the essence of "Please Give," a black comedy from writer/director Nicole Holofcener about how sometimes even charity is selfish.

Kate, well-played by Catherine Keener, is hooked on pity. She doles out $20 bills to the homeless, but won't buy her teen daughter the expensive pair of jeans she's dying for. Kate volunteers at a nursing home, but is asked to leave after a few hours because her fretful concern for the aged residents brings them down.

She and husband Alex (a spot-on Oliver Platt) run a business selling vintage furniture they bought off the bereaved offspring of the recently dead, who didn't know what they had. Perhaps Kate's runaway giving is an unconscious offset for their outrageous markups.

Their next-door neighbor is 91-year-old Andra, whose space Kate and Alex will take over whenever she kicks off. Andra has two granddaughters: Rebecca and Mary (Rebecca Hall and Amanda Peet, respectively) who are mirror images of altruism. Rebecca gives so much of herself there isn't much left for a real life, while Mary is following in Andra's nasty, self-centered footsteps.

"Please Give" is filled with delightful performances, but I found it hard to connect with any of the characters. The film's deeper theme seems to be about how people can be generous on the one hand and cutthroat on the other.

For Kate, everything's a competition -- even who can be the nicest to the less fortunate.

Video goodies are not so good.

The extras are rather minimal. There's a roundup of outtakes from production, a behind-the-scenes tour on the set, and clips from a Q&A with Holofcener.

Anyone else see the irony of a movie called "Please Give" being released with measly set of bonus features?

Movie: 2.5 stars out of four
Extras: 1.5 stars

Review: "The Town"

"The Town" is such a well-executed cops-and-robbers drama dripping with Boston flavor, it takes us a while before we realize it's built on a mountain of Hollywood clichés.

Ben Affleck, who also directed and co-wrote the screenplay, plays a careful bank robber who tosses his professional detachment out the window for the damsel-in-distress: The manager (Rebecca Hall) at the last bank he robbed.

Throw in a headstrong FBI agent (Jon Hamm) hot on his tail, a trigger-happy partner in crime (Jeremy Renner) and a local mob boss (Pete Postlethwaite) who won't let him walk away from the "family business," and the film practically churns itself out of a Screenwriting 101 class.

Oh, I almost forgot: This is the Affleck character's "one last job" before he calls it quits and heads to Florida.

(The film could have been even more pat -- I haven't read the novel on which it was based, Chuck Hogan's "Prince of Thieves," but I understand in the book the cop falls for the same girl.)

This review is sounding like a pan, but read the first half of the first sentence again: Affleck gives such a confident, authentic performance -- both in front of and behind the camera -- that these familiar tropes take on a lively, at times electric quality that make us feel like we're discovering them anew.

Renner is particularly good as Jim Coughlin, a crook and killer with two strikes against him, and swears there won't be a third. He accepts who he is, and is resigned to whatever fate a life of a crime holds for him. "If something goes down, we'll be holding court in the streets," he vows before a big heist.

When they were teenagers, Jim killed a guy to protect his best friend Doug MacRay (Affleck), doing nine years in prison without a peep. Maybe that's why Doug keeps him around as a wingman, despite Jim's tendency to shoot first, and ask no questions at all.

Affleck and his co-writers, Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard, take pains to make Doug a sympathetic character. He methodically plans out his robberies, right down to knowing the biographies of the bank guards and nuking the surveillance video tapes in the microwave, so we respect his attention to detail -- especially his efforts to prevent violence.

Things go awry when Jim kidnaps Claire (Hall). She's released unharmed, but Jim is jumpy that she might gives clues to the feds. She cooperates with Special Agent Frawley (does the FBI have regular, un-special Agents?) but fails to pass on a key detail.

Doug agrees to shadow Claire, ends up bumping into her, and finds the attraction powerful, and mutual. Though they don't have a lot of scenes together, Affleck and Hall make the romance seem fleshy and real. I especially liked the undercurrent of class rivalry between them, with Doug a palooka Townie and Claire a yuppie interloper, or "Toonie."

That brings us to the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown, whose rough-hewn, cloistered personality bleeds into every scene. Affleck and the rest of the cast nail the Beantown accent -- with such success, in fact, that I occasionally had trouble understanding them -- and the great cinematography (by Robert Elswit) captures the hardscrabble charm of the mean streets.

Affleck's always had screen presence, and with his hair starting to gray a little, it gives him a bit of authority he didn't have during his matinee idol days. "The Town" isn't quite as good as Affleck's directorial debut, the terrific "Gone Baby Gone," but clearly this is the work of a guy who knows how to tell stories.

Imagine what he could do with something a bit more original.

3 stars out of four

Review: "Please Give"

The people we meet in "Please Give" are almost uniformly unpleasant in some way or another. But they hide their meanness behind a veneer of beneficence that is so dear to them, they actually believe they're nice.

Take Kate, more or less the main character, played by Catherine Keener. She's middle-aged, successful, with a husband and teen daughter. Kate literally cannot pass a homeless person on the Manhattan street without giving them money -- her need to be generous is so consuming that on occasion she mistakenly offers cash to regular people minding their own business.

See, Kate is not attached so much to giving as the feeling of superiority she derives from helping total strangers. For her, pity is a like a drug.

Perhaps it's the guilt she feels from the business in which she and her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) are partners. They buy old furniture from the children of old people who have died, and then resell it at a considerable markup as vintage treasures.

They're essentially upscale ambulance chasers, cheating the bereaved who don't know what they've got.

In fact, Alex and Kate have bought the apartment next door to theirs from Andra (Ann Morgan Guilbert), a sour-pussed 91-year-old, with the intention of knocking through the walls to expand whenever the old lady kicks off. They act nice to Andra, offering to make trips to the drugstore for her. But everyone, including Andra, knows they're just counting the days until they can finally have their master suite.

Andra's granddaughters are Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and Mary (Amanda Peet), who live together in quiet conflict. Mary is a cosmetologist who doesn't believe in hiding her antipathy toward her grandmother, who has the elderly habit of saying incredibly hateful or racist things.

Andra may indeed be a nasty old bitch, but Mary has a few decades' head start.

Rebecca, on the other hand, is sweet to her core, even if she's a bit distant to those around her. Rebecca works as a radiology assistant, spending her days squishing women's boobs into the scanning machine. She shares such intimacy with her patients, Rebecca finds little zeal for it in her own life.

Kate and Alex have a 15-year-old daughter, Abby (Sarah Steele), an awkward kid with a terrible acne problem and a lust for a $235 pair of jeans. Kate's generosity to strangers is galling to Abby, who at one point snatches a $20 bill out of a homeless man's hand, furious that her mother is more giving to a street person than her own daughter.

"Please Give" is written and directed by Nicole Holofcener, who's previously made three other movies with Keener, including "Lovely & Amazing" and "Friends with Money." Like her other works, it's a highly personal film about women and their relationships, their flaws and complexities.

I was thoroughly engaged the entire time I spent with this terrific cast, who deliver sensitive and brave performances. But I kept feeling the movie pushing me away, as if I did not belong inside the circle of people I was observing.

It's hard to say exactly what the film is about. There's an exploration of the New York City mindset, in which people seem to be in a constant, unspoken competition with each other, scrapping for the biggest apartment with the nicest things in it -- and not necessarily even things they like, just stuff that other people will think is nice.

Mostly, though, the unstated theme touches on how even when people offer a hand to others, they're sometimes still being selfish. I just wish "Please Give" could have been a little more generous with itself.

2.5 stars out of four