Review: "The Longest Ride"

Movies based on Nicholas Sparks books tend to be short on brainpower but long on emotional tug. "The Longest Yard" is the best one since "The Notebook," making up most of the yardage in smarts without sacrificing too much in the way of passion.

Like all Sparks flicks, it centers around a volatile relationship between two young people from different worlds. It also borrows the familiar technique of giving us a parallel story of another love from another time, with connections between the two growing stronger as the film goes on.

It stars Britt Robertson and Scott Eastwood as one couple in the current time, while Oona Chaplin and Jack Huston are the antique pair.

If some of those names sound familiar, that's because they are. Chaplin is the granddaughter of the great Charlie Chaplin, and Eastwood is the son of Clint Eastwood. (I thought Huston might be one of the Hollywood Hustons, John/Danny/Angelica, but no, he's a Brit.)

Overall it's a nice cast, with each couple sharing warm chemistry between them. It also features Alan Alda in the old man role, and he's quite effective in an understated way.

The story is this: Sophia (Robertson), smart art student from Wake Forest meets Carolina bull rider Luke (Eastwood). They fall hard for each other, but she's soon headed to New York to work at a gallery, while he's chasing the elusive championship after some very hard knocks. On the way home from a magical first date, they rescue Ira (Alda), an old man whose car has run off the road, along with a box of old letters.

While visiting Ira in the hospital, Sophia reads the letters to him, which chronicle the tale of his lifelong love, Ruth (Chaplin). Part of the close-knit Jewish community in Greensboro in the 1940s, they fell in love themselves and started a life together, but not without certain challenges and tragedies along the way. Huston takes over the role of Ira as a youngster.

"Love requires sacrifice -- always," says elder Ira, in the sort of movie where characters just blurt out its main theme.

In the case of Luke and Sophia, that means he must give up the ranch and cracking his skulls falling off bulls, and she has to shelve her dreams of curating great art, or both.

Robertson is a charismatic and likeable star. Her face looks like a cross between Lena Headey ("Game of Thrones") and Linda Hamilton, and she has the spunk of a young Reese Witherspoon about her. Eastwood is like a prettier version of his dad, and much of the early going involves both cowgirls and college girls growing woozy at the sight of him. His acting's a bit stiff in the talkie scenes, but again, just like pop.

The Chaplin/Huston pairing is even better, enhanced by spectacular period costumes, cars and sets. Director George Tillman Jr. ("Men of Honor") shows off Sparks' North Carolina backyard in all its sun-dappled gorgeousness. He even manages to capture the frenetic, bestial grace of bull riding -- though, like the quarter mile races in "The Fast and the Furious," those 8-second rides somehow get stretched out to a minute of screen time.

"The Longest Ride" is a big cinematic piece of caramel-covered melted cheese, unapologetically sweet and sappy. But it will cause warm swells in the heart and a tear or two to be shed.

Review: "American Hustle"

In one of his final reviews, the incomparable Roger Ebert declared a film “fabulously well-acted and crafted, but when I reach for it, my hand closes on air.” I felt much the same way about “American Hustle,” which boasts an entire crowd of Academy Award-winning and -nominated thespians, one of Hollywood’s most lauded writer/directors, a buzzy historical subject, and a crushing identity crisis.

What the heck is this movie about? Ostensibly, it’s a fictionalized version of the Abscam scandal of 30-odd years ago that led to the conviction of a bunch of Congressmen and other government officials on corruption charges. But in the sprawling, unwieldy adaptation, it seems like merely an excuse for a bunch of actors to dress up in horrid ‘70s fashions and exchange frenetic volleys of dialogue that often make not a lick of sense.

Eric Singer’s screenplay exploring some little-known peculiarities of the imbroglio had languished around Hollywood for years, turning up on lists of the best non-produced scripts. Director David O. Russell did his own rewrite to intentionally turn the real-life characters into caricatures, and make the shenanigans even crazier than they actually were.

(Fittingly, Singer’s original title was “American Bullpucky,” though he used a different word.)

The cast is led by Christian Bale as Irving Rosenfeld, a brilliant but complex con man. Outwardly the role is showy, with Bale putting on weight to gain a big belly, and wearing an elaborate comb-over hairdo, tinted glasses and cheesy facial hair. But Irving lives mostly inside his own head, and sometimes has difficulty putting his schemes into action.

Bale never quite breaks through the wall between an actor’s creation and the audience, and Irving largely remains a sphinx to us.

Irving’s muse and partner in crime is Sydney Prosser, played by Amy Adams, who adopted the persona and lilt of a refined British woman so long ago, it’s taken over her identity. She cares deeply for Irving, for reasons that are unclear to her, and us. Adams gets her own makeover with a poodle perm and necklines that perpetually plunge down to her navel.

The third, and unsteadiest leg of the triad of leading characters is Richie DiMaso, played by Bradley Cooper, who is the FBI agent who busts Sydney and Irving and forces them to become his operatives.

They entrap politicians (including a sharp Jeremy Renner as a New Jersey mayor) with promises of a massive casino financed by a mysterious Arab sheikh. Richie lets the power go to his head, and convinces himself he and Sydney are soul mates.

If you thought this was yet another story about a love triangle, then you’d be wrong, because it’s actually a quadrangle.

Jennifer Lawrence turns up as Irving’s wife, Rosalyn, a walking electric ball of neuroses. Feeling abandoned by her husband’s criminal antics and his attentions for Sydney, Rosalyn inserts herself into the mix by sheer force of will, which proves troublesome when their business dealings wander into the purview of the mafia.

Narratively, Rosalyn doesn’t really serve much purpose in the story, other than to gum up the works and generate chaos. Lawrence is so crackling good, though, that the film goes into a torpor whenever she walks off-screen.

Rounding out the cast is Louis C.K. as Richie’s put-upon boss and Michael Peña as a Mexican-American fed who gets tapped to portray the sheikh. Robert De Niro also makes an uncredited appearance in a familiar role.

The experience of seeing “American Hustle” is like being at a wild party where you don’t know anybody, and find yourself shoved into a corner watching the mayhem happening all around. You never really understand the whats and the whys of it all, and you stroll out the door unchanged from how you were when you walked in, mostly trying to remember who sent the invitation and why you accepted it.

Review: "Not Fade Away"

There's a moment of unintentional hilarity in "Not Fade Away," the semi-autobiographical account by "Sopranos" creator David Chase about his yearning to break into the music business during the 1960s.

The main character, Douglas, a stand-in for Chase himself, has been dragged to the cinema by his artistically inclined girlfriend. Astute film lovers will recognize the main feature as Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up," one of the most seminal films of the era. But Douglas is clearly not impressed -- he wonders why there isn't a musical score telling him when to feel happy or sad.

"Nothing ever happens in this movie," he complains.

Turns out, nothing much ever happened with Chase's rock 'n' roll aspirations, either. And the film he wrote and directed about those times and tribulations is desperately short on narrative momentum, too.

Granted, movies like this are more about mood and character than gobs of storytelling. But after awhile we feel like "Not Fade Away" is just as excuse to play a lot of really cool music and set a bunch of good-looking young actors in the foreground to pout and fret in time to the tunes.

This downbeat drama is unfocused and languid, almost to the point of being inert.

Douglas (John Magaro) is the drummer who's content to stay in the background, until the one night the cocky lead singer Eugene (Jack Huston) is out sick and he's forced to step behind the microphone, and finds out he's a more soulful crooner than anyone knew. Wells (Will Brill), the lead guitarist and somewhat loopy creative driving force, backs Douglas' move to headliner, which leads to predictable sparks amongst the group.

Things play out from late 1963, shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, up to 1968 or '69. The boys are all New Jersey sons of immigrants who change superficially as the music scene does, graduating from bowl haircuts and Cuban-heeled boots to long hippie locks and bell-bottoms. They drink booze, smoke a lot of weed and get into moderate amounts of trouble.

The older generation frowns disapprovingly at their kids' commotions, led by James Gandolfini as Doug's dad. The character as written by Chase is more an archetype than a person, the sort of man who works hard, scrounges and worries, and continually seethes when his efforts aren't rewarded with success.

"Nobody gave the Italians anything when we had nothing," one of his buddies complains, summing up their generation's lament.

Supporting characters are wafer-thin. Doug's mother (Molly Price) is a shrieking harridan whose only method of control over her family is threatening suicide. Kid sister Evelyn (Meg Guzulescu) is the narrator and eyes and ears of the audience.

Perhaps the character who best encapsulates this film's problems is Doug's erstwhile girlfriend Grace Dietz (Bella Heathcote). It's a classic popular-girl-chooses-nobody scenario, and while we never really understand what Doug sees in her beyond her delicate beauty, the audience gains even lesser insight into what she cherishes about him.

The band plays some gigs, wanders apart and back together again, seems to get close to signing a record deal with a big-label honcho (Brad Garrett), but circumstances intervene with more obstacles and delays.

It's notable that the band this movie is ostensibly about never gains a permanent name. Maybe that's appropriate, since "Don't Fade Away" seems more like a concept for a film than a coherent story.

1.5 stars out of four

Review: "Shrink"

In general, I'm not a big fan of ensemble films. "Shrink" is the rare exception that works on nearly every level.

The problem with movies boasting a large number of characters with layered, intersecting storylines is that they tend to be inconsistent. Some characters and plots are engaging and interesting, while others are not. We end up squirming in our seat, impatient to get back to the stuff we like.

Take "Babel," a high-profile ensemble drama from 2006. I found the parts about Cate Blanchette and Brad Pitt as tourists in the Middle East exceedingly tiresome, while the sections about the shepherd father and his two sons were powerful.

When they're done right, which is rarely -- Robert Altman's "Nashville" and Lawrence Kasdan's "Grand Canyon" come to mind -- ensemble films remind us that we're interconnected, and evoke a sense of community and place.

For "Shrink," that place is Hollywood, and the community is a collection of movie actors, agents and wannabes loosely connected through their association with a psychiatrist, played by Kevin Spacey. Henry Carter, the "shrink to the stars," is best described as the main character, although it's more of a first-among-equals type of thing.

There's also Jeremy (Mark Webber), a hipster screenwriter who is a parking valet by day. And Jemma (Keke Palmer), a high school student who ditches class to watch movies. And Kate Amberson (Saffron Burrows), a big star who's taken a few years off to raise a family, and finding that her options are limited for "older" actresses (she's perhaps 37).

Some of the characters appear to be based on real-life figures. Shamus (Jack Huston) is a young Irish actor with brooding dark looks who immediately strikes it big before he's really had a chance to find himself as an actor, or as a person, and falls into the drugs-and-partying crowd.

Sound familiar?

Others represent archetypes, such as Robin Williams as an aging star who needs help resisting temptations of the flesh, and Dallas Roberts as a super-agent who's too busy making deals and threatening adversaries to bother with actually reading scripts or watching movies.

The agent-as-cannibal thing has been done before (including by Spacey, in "Swimming with Sharks"), but Roberts adds notes of humanity and dark humor that lets us accept his character as a real person, rather than a cartoonish caricature.

Carter is despondent over the suicide of his wife, and spends his days smoking copious amounts of pot in between therapy sessions and promoting his book, ironically titled "Happiness." Carter is clearly in a descending spiral, and gets confronted in an intervention by his friends, but he angrily defends his need to grieve.

Screenwriter Thomas Moffett and director Jonas Pate -- both relative newcomers -- twist these characters together in a web of associations that's improbable, but feels authentic. Some of them are nice people, some are decidedly not, but hanging around with each of them feels like time well spent.

3.5 stars