Review: "Vox Lux"

"Vox Lux" is a movie about... something. I'm honestly not sure what. It stars Natalie Portman in the second half as a Lady Gaga-esque pop superstar struggling in her relationships with her sister, daughter and manager. In the first half the character shows how she got where she is, parlaying a horrible childhood incident into a career.

The last 20 minutes is Celeste's big comeback concert -- though don't you dare call it that -- and we're treated to an elaborate stage show of lights, pyrotechnics and exuberant dancing as Portman warbles through various techno-tweaked tunes that could have been sung by, well, anybody.

The Celeste of the first half is a sweet kid of 14 tempted by the sparkle of fame and fortune, and in the second half she's a total rhymes-with-witch who seems decades older than her 31 years, resentful of all the attention she gets while not-so-secretly feeding off it to sustain her sense of self.

All of this is accompanied by flat, emotionless narration by Willem Dafoe. It's the sort of narration that doesn't tell you anything the movie doesn't, so you wonder why it's there.

Surprisingly, it's the second half that's hard to get through. Portman plays Celeste as a shrill, nasty harpy who somehow forgot she's supposed to be the nice girl. There's no emotional match with the wide-eyed kid she was, played by Raffey Cassidy. We wonder what happened in the in-between.

I'd have liked to have seen that movie.

We follow Celeste around as she has nasty encounters with the press, with a restaurant manager who asks for a photo, with her manager (Jude Law), her sister, Ellie (Stacy Martin), her teen daughter, Albertine (Cassidy again) and well, pretty much everybody. Celeste is estranged from Ellie, who writes her songs and takes care of her kid, but gets treated like dirt for her trouble.

The first part is more interesting, when a disturbed classmate shoots up Celeste's class, wounding her seriously in the neck. She wears braces and decorative collars for the rest of the movie. After she and Ellie come up with a heartfelt song for the memorial ceremony, it becomes a national anthem. The manager (never named) is brought in to guide her, which follows a predictable path of ear-candy songs, bizarro makeup effects and squirmy dance moves.

What's the point of it all? I dunno. Writer/director Brady Corbet seems to be trying to fashion a morality tale about how even the most earnest intentions can become twisted in the caldron of the celebrity-making machine. Sounds like a terrible bargain, but not an interesting enough one to watch for two hours.

Review: "Little Men"

"Little Men" is a movie about the little moments and in-between spaces of human relationships. It sets out not to spin a complicated plot but to present a small group of people to you and then observe them closely. It's a tender and true portrait of what it's like to be a 13-year-old boy, or a parent of one.

Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri play the boys, and they're just magnificent. Honest, unadorned reflections of the awkwardness and cockiness of that age. Taplitz plays Jake, a budding artist who's reserved and thoughtful, a tiny bit alienated. Barbieri is Tony, outspoken and outgoing, delighting us with a New York patois filled with verbal idiosyncrasies and rhythms.

Tony, not surprisingly, wants to be an actor. They both aspire to get into a fancy Manhattan arts high school.

Jake's parents are Brian (Greg Kinnear, in fine form), an actor who labors for his craft but earns little income doing it, and Kathy (Jennifer Ehle), a psychotherapist who acts as the family's even keel. Tony's only parent is Paulina (Leonor Calvelli), a Chilean expat who runs a quaint little dress shop in Brooklyn.

The group is brought together by the death of Brian's father, who owned the shop building shop and the apartment above, where Brian grew up. They decide to leave their pricey Manhattan place to take up residence there. Their interactions with Paulina are pleasant if a little distant. But Tony and Jake become instant best friends.

Director Ira Sachs ("Love Is Strange"), who co-wrote the original script with Mauricio Zacharias, has an intrinsic feel for the outlook and emotionality of young teenagers. It's a tough age for boys (or anyone), caught between school, girls, video games and parents. Tony feels the pull to maintain a sense of bravado, so he instigates a fight against a friend in the face of some harmless teasing. Jake is more an observer and introvert, so having someone like Tony to push and pull him into socializing is beneficial.

I adored the moment where Tony plucks up the courage to ask a classmate out while they're dancing in a crowded club and she tells him she's "into older men." (Like what? A 17-year-old? Honey, 17-year-olds don't want to date 13-year-olds unless some of their wiring is crossed.) Rather than going screwy with anger, Tony simply says, "Thank you for being honest," then slinks away.

The trouble arises when it comes time to renew the lease for Leonor's store. Brian's dad never raised the rent, so the $1,100 a month she's paying is seriously under-market in a hip gentrifying neighborhood. Brian's more mercenary sister, Audrey (Talia Balsam), insists they could get $5,000. He's a decent man but they could use the money. He offers an in-between price.

When presented with this problem, Leonor tends to just... disappear. She avoids conversations, or steers it in another direction. When eventually confronted, she goes into long speeches about how much Brian's father appreciated having her there, how her ship is a staple of the neighborhood. When this doesn't work she grows more subtly caustic, insinuating the Brian's father questioned his manhood because his wife brings in almost all their family income.

Leonor likes to think of herself as the voice of wisdom, valuing the community over the individual -- but she's got a streak of steel in her, too. Meanwhile, Leonor's friend the lawyer (Alfred Molina) takes a look at the paperwork, ratcheting up tensions.

The boys react to the conflict by drawing closer to each other. They make a pact not to speak to their parents until the matter is resolved. The trio of grownups try to brush off this minor rebellion, but their patience eventually wears thin. (There's only so much nodding a parent can take at the dinner table.)

"Little Men" is a movie of small revelations, not any big "aha" moment. Things end on an ambiguous note, because that's how life mostly plays out. It's a story of people intersecting -- sometimes hugging, sometimes abrading against each other.

Review: "Fifty Shades of Grey"

Honestly, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Which isn't to say it was any good, just not laugh-out-loud ridiculously dreadful.

Every few years Hollywood likes to get naughty. They'll make a big-profile movie with an overtly sexual angle and then milk it for all it's worth. "See? We're not afraid to push the envelope!"

Of course, most of these flicks end up being pretty tame. The best test is to wait a few years and see how it registers. Most likely people who bypassed the hullabaloo at the time will discover it's shown up on Netflix or what have you, watch it and think to themselves, "This is what all the fuss was about?"

Heck, remember when people got all boiled over about "Striptease"?

"Fifty Shades of Grey," based on the uber-popular book, is about a romance between an innocent young college girl and a billionaire with a taste for BDSM play. That stands for bondage, dominance and sadism-masochism -- I had to look it up -- which most people would just shorthand as bondage or S&M.

The book by E.L. James started out as fan fiction and is unread by me, but those who have tell me the writing is atrocious, including misspellings and bad grammar you rarely see in the mass publishing industry. Nonetheless, it's struck a chord with an overwhelmingly female audience, with it and its two sequels selling something like 100 million copies worldwide.

The story and dialogue are pretty goofy. It's the classic boy-meets-girl, boy-woos-girl, boy-wants-to-whip-girl-but-she's-not-so-sure-about-it kind of tale. They spend much of the movie discussing an actual contract to govern their sexual relationship, but somehow never get around to signing the thing and just go for it anyway.

(Attorneys will thus consider it a horror film.)

Everyone will want to know about the sex scenes, so let's go ahead and discuss that.

There are three -- well, four, with the last coming right on the heels of the third, so they kinda blend -- and there's a fair amount of flesh to be seen. We see a lot of her boobs and butt, and a whole bunch of sidal nudity where we imagine we might have gotten an oblique glimpse of the great-and-holy, but not really. He's also naked a lot, though not nearly as often, and somehow we don't really see very much of him -- certainly not a pickle shot, even a fabled and fleeting glimpse like Ben Affleck's peen in "Gone Girl."

Not surprisingly, the actors displaying all their wares are ones you've probably never heard of. Dakota Johnson plays Anastasia Steele and Jamie Dornan plays Christian Grey, and if those aren't the two most fake-sounding character names ever committed to paper, then I don't know what is.

You see, big stars don't like to show their bodies too much. Maybe they think it'll limit their careers, or they don't want to worry about it getting screencapped all over the web, or they just want to maintain a little bit of mystery around their persona.

You'll notice that even the rare ones that do prodigious nude scenes, like Ewan McGregor and Kate Winslet, tend to get kidded about it and then suddenly the kits stop coming off. Angelina Jolie used to drop trou all the time, and now we've had barely a hiney shot from her in the last decade. Maria Bello was Old Faithful for full frontal, and now she's making inspiring Disney flicks.

A young actor might do a daring nude scene to get noticed and launch their career, which is what I'm guessing Johnson and Dornan -- or at least their handlers -- are hoping for. Then they might have a cheeky scene (literally) or two as they're segueing into mainstream movies. But once they become a big box office draw or get nominated for an Oscar, the no-nudity clauses come out of the woodwork.

Maybe, if their star dims with time, they might do a nude scene for the sheer shock of it, but by then audiences are more interested in somebody else's niblets. This is known as the Meg Ryan effect. Finally, when they get old there's a possibility of a flash for sheer comic effect, like when Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas mooned us or Jack Nicholson walked in on Diane Keaton

Anyway, I guess I should talk about "Fifty Shades of Grey" some more, but I don't really feel like it. It's mildly sexy, at least the first time Christian blindfolds Anastasia with one of his ties and reaches for a leather riding crop. But mostly it's a bunch of talking about sex rather than doing it, false emotions and shitty dialogue.

I have no doubt this will big a big hit, because if even 20% of the people who read the book go see the movie, that's a lot of tickets. And clearly director Sam Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Kelly Marcel are setting us up for a sequel. Maybe we deserve it.

Video review: "Robocop"

I’m not mortally offended by Hollywood wanting to remake one of the seminal movies of my youth, but did they have to be so tame about it? This mincing, PG-13-rated sci-fi action/drama feels like it’s had all its precious bodily fluids slurped out of it. The result is cool-looking but rather unexciting.

The story is familiar: in a dystopian near-future, noble Detroit cop Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) is blown apart in the line of duty. He’s put back together as cyborg by a nefarious corporation that runs the police services, and is sold to the public as their savior. But there’s more to the story, with Michael Keaton playing the villain who cares more about maximizing revenues than actually improving lives.
The new look of Robocop is quite a sight, with black armor and a red eye slit. Though no one’s ever satisfactorily explained to me why they leave his lower face exposed.

Rounding out the cast are Abbie Cornish as Mrs. Murphy; Michael K. Williams as Murphy’s partner; Samuel L. Jackson as a demagogic TV yapper; Gary Oldman as a conflicted scientist; and Jackie Earle Haley as a mercenary stooge.

Murphy/Robocop comes across more as a video game avatar than an authentic tortured soul. And the over-the-top bloody violence so intrinsic to the 1987 movie are replaced with CGI-heavy eye candy.
The new “Robocop” isn’t a terrible flick. But it commits the one crime that the enduring memory of the original renders unforgiveable: it’s forgettable.

The movie comes with a decent enough mix of video extras. There are a handful of deleted scenes, schematics of Robocop and other Omnicorp creatures and hardware, and three making-of featurettes.

Movie:

Extras:

Review: "Robocop"

In 1987 I was a pimply teen slinging/sweeping popcorn in a movie theater when the boss asked me to help set up a stand-up promo for an upcoming film in the lobby. As we fit together the various cardboard pieces, the name and chrome-domed image of "Robocop" came into focus.

We couldn't stop laughing. It looked like the goofiest, dumbest thing we'd ever seen. The display continued to provoke titters and jokes the next few weeks. We'd walk past it in a herky-jerky manner, dubbing ourselves "Robo-usher."

Then we saw the movie.

The laughing stopped, and although we'd continue to imitate Robocop, it was now performed with reverence instead of mockery.

Director Paul Verhoeven's "Robocop" instantly became an iconic film for a number of reasons. There was the kitschy premise of a man-turned-android, plus of course some very hard-edged violence -- initially earning an X rating from the MPAA -- that ping-ponged between cartoonish and nauseating. There was the incredibly cynical, sardonic view of a near-future Detroit ruled by Machiavellian corporations and dimwitted media info-tainment.

But at the center was the surprisingly soulful journey of the main character, an everyman cop who gains superhero-esque powers but has to give up a huge chunk of his humanity in the process. We cheered Robocop, and we pitied him.

The new remake is thoroughly unnecessary, but that doesn't mean the effort can't yield a good movie, as we saw with the recent reboot of the Spider-man franchise. Director José Padilha, a veteran from Brazil, and rookie screenwriter Joshua Zetumer come up with a promising premise, in which Robocop isn't a cutting-edge breakthrough, but simply a backward-engineered commodity designed to make robot law enforcement palatable to a malleable American public.

In the rest of the world, robots manufactured by Omnicorp run a martial state where even Iran is kept in line by scary machines, including the gargantuan ED-209s from the last film, as well as man-sized EM-208s. But politicians in the U.S. have barred them from policing domestically, resulting in $600 billion annually in lost revenues for CEO Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton).

The first hour or so is heady stuff, as Detroit detective Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) sees his life turned upside down after an explosion leaves his body in tatters, and comes to grips with the idea of living inside a metal suit. He's certainly got a cool new look, with black armor and a red slit for eyes. (Plus a pair of guns he never has to reload, ever.)

But the movie goes sideways in the second half, with neither the sarcastic humor or the PG-13 action scenes landing with a lot of punch.

Joel Kinnaman is believable as Murphy/Robocop, though he's a mite too pretty to be taken seriously as an anti-hero; the filmmakers repeatedly succumb to temptation to leave his face exposed. (Why exactly do they leave the lower half of his face unprotected?) Gary Oldman is a welcome presence as Dennett Norton, the conflicted scientist put in charge of the Robocop program.

Another thing lacking in the new movie is a hiss-able villain on the order of Clarence Bodicker, the sadistic killer from the original film. Keaton's Sellars is more slimy than hateful, a disreputable Steve Jobs type who likes to control the media. Jackie Earle Haley shows up as Robocop's taunting instructor, but he's a little too mercenary to really get our dander up.

Michael K. Williams and Abbie Cornish are pretty much wasted as, respectively, Murphy's partner and wife, mostly standing on the sidelines and wondering where the man disappeared inside the machine.

Samuel L. Jackson fires surprising blanks as Pat Novack, a demagogic broadcaster who acts as Omnicorp's jingoistic cheerleader. I think the problem is the character is so close to the unhinged talking heads we see on cable news every night, he's too familiar to serve as a cautionary tale.

I don't hate the idea of Hollywood remaking one of the seminal movies from my formative years, but the result is too tame to justify its own existence. There is one jaw-dropping moment in the film that hints of darker, grander themes to come. But it's soon forgotten in a wave of video-game shootouts and one-liners recycled from 1987.

Review: "Zero Dark Thirty"

"Zero Dark Thirty" plays out like a TV crime procedural with a bigger budget and loftier aspirations. It almost has the tone of a documentary film, depicting the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden with little prejudice or embellishment.

What we end up with is something boasting an almost journalistic feel, portraying American national security personnel not as we'd to think they would be, but as they actually are. Which is to say: focused, fallible, and capable of both amazing heroism and gut-churning brutality.

Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal started to make a movie about the early search for bin Laden after 9/11, but then the terrorist leader was assassinated by U.S. troops in 2011, acting on information painstakingly gathered by the CIA. They quickly retooled to bring a more comprehensive tale, culminating in the high-tension raid on the compound in Pakistan where bin Laden had been living for several years.

I was very impressed with the attention to detail in "Zero Dark Thirty," and its lessons about the sort of warfare our country wages in the 21st century. It's one based not on nuclear missiles or big metal hardware, but tiny slivers of data gathered from thousands of sources. The challenge is less like finding a needle in a haystack than reassembling a mirror smashed into a million shards, without knowing the shape it had before being broken.

The film is not as emotionally engaging as I'd wished. Jessica Chastain does yeoman's work in portraying Maya, the one CIA investigator who does nothing for a decade but hunt bin Laden. The character has no internal motivations or external life beyond getting her man. It's not surprising that Maya is a composite of several real figures, since she has no real identity beyond her mission.

The story skips around in time and place, the first half depicting the early clues to bin Laden's disappearance from Afghanistan, taking us up to 2004. Then the trail goes cold, and the film picks up again four years later, when Maya stumbles across evidence of a high-level bin Laden courier who most of the other intelligence forces believe is already dead. She proves he's alive, and follows him straight to that dusty Pakistani compound.

In fictional movies about spycraft, the agents shown searching for evidence are also the ones who go out into the field and nab the bad guys. Here, it's clearly revealed that the snoops stay mostly behind their desks and have an uneasy relationship with the troops on the front lines. At one point, Maya has to practically beg a field commander to set up a surveillance net on the courier.

In the film's most controversial section, which is right at the beginning, a CIA interrogator named Dan (Jason Clarke, in a chilling performance) is shown employing "enhanced" methods against detainees, including waterboarding.

For a film that was accused of being controversial before it even finished production, "Zero Dark Thirty" is steadfastly neutral on the subject of torture. The interrogations are clearly depicted as brutal and dehumanizing, and it's hard to watch Americans carrying out these sorts of depraved actions. But the movie is also quite clear in showing how the information obtained in this way was critical to identifying the courier who led us to bin Laden.

Bigelow and Boal do not go in for big ethical quandaries and principled dilemmas, though. Maya, who is present but does not partake in the brutality, is repulsed by it but also does not hesitate to make use of the fruits it produces.

"Zero Dark Thirty" is an effective and expertly made film, but a more character-driven story would've added some flesh to the bones of a great, true story.

3.5 stars out of four

Video review: "Contagion"

"Contagion" is a well-made science fiction thriller that engages the intellect better than must such films generally do, but sometimes fails to grab our hearts along with our brains.

Director Steven Soderbergh assembles a huge cast of stars -- including Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law and Elliott Gould -- and sets them to encounter an outbreak of a deadly virus called MEV-1. The human population starts dropping like flies, and it's up to a loose consortium of scientists and government officials to race for a cure before mankind finds itself exterminated.

Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns cleverly doesn't go for the usual end-of-the-world tropes, in which the disaster is seen through the eyes of a small band of survivors. Instead, he offers a newsier docu-drama feel in which humanity's soaring grace and grimy faults are left to play out with logic and sobering authenticity.

People grow selfish and petty, and governments begin the task of coldly calculating which lives are worth saving and which are not. But amid the panic is self-sacrifice and generosity.

Even though it's better at making us think than letting audiences feel the characters' plight, "Contagion" remains an ambitious, worthy portrait of fear and hope.

Extra features are fair at best. The DVD edition comes with only a single featurette, "Contagion: How a Virus Changes the World."

Upgrade to the Blu-ray/DVD combo, and you add two more featurettes: "False Comfort Zone: The Reality of Contagion" and "The Contagion Detectives."

Obviously, that's not a lot of infectious enthusiasm on the part of the filmmakers to provide extra goodies for those who pass up the Redbox kiosk to plunk down money to add "Contagion" to their permanent video library.

Movie: 3 stars out of four
Extras: 2 stars

Review: "Contagion"

"Contagion" is a gripping movie, but the things that make it good also limit how good it can be.

It's an attempt by director Steven Soderbergh, screenwriter Scott Z. Burns and a large ensemble cast to portray the outbreak of a world-wide epidemic in a realistic way rather than through a handful of descriptive characters and a melodramatic story arc. At this, it succeeds completely.

So instead of, say, a small group of survivors hacking their way through the remnants of a world turned upside down -- "28 Days Later" and "I Am Legend" are a couple of examples -- Soderbergh's film is a docu-drama that covers dozens of stories that intersect. This roving-eye approach allows us to observe as the populace grows uptight and scared, the government response becomes more and more sclerotic, and the center falls apart.

It's a sobering experience, watching heroic doctors and scientists racing against the clock to come up with a vaccine before the mathematical certainty of the disease's spread wipes the human race out. We also see the ugly side of humanity that reacts out of fear or avarice to exploit the situation -- such as Alan Krumwiede, a blogger played by Jude law who's convinced the government is controlling the situation to maximize pharmaceutical companies' profits.

(Great throwaway line from one of his targets: "Blogging isn't writing. It's graffiti with punctuation!")

But as engaging as this method of storytelling is on an intellectual level, the film often fails to grab us emotionally. Certain well-played scenes have power -- such as when one of the central characters, a crusading scientist working to solve the problem, becomes sick -- while others just sort of lay themselves out there, heavy on information but light on visceral impact.

And there's a few too many "science montages" of test tubes spinning in a centrifuge, specimens sealed in plastic, and people hobbling around in funny-looking environmental suits. Those scenes practically needed their own theme music.

I do respect the movie for its willingness to kill off characters without regard to the status of the actor who's playing them. Some famous faces end up thrown in a pit or on an autopsy table -- the latter being incredibly life-like and gruesome.

Likewise, some people who at first seem peripheral to the story, almost background characters, subtly nudge to the fore and become critical players. This "e pluribus unum" approach gives the film a realistic authenticity.

Matt Damon plays Mitch Emhoff, an unemployed house-husband whose wife, Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow), is one of the earliest people to contract the bug, later dubbed MEV-1. Only a partial list of other players includes Kate Winslet as an investigator with the Center for Disease Control, Laurence Fishburne as her do-gooder boss, Marion Cotillard as a World Health Organization expert, Chin Han as a Hong Kong official, Elliot Gould as a private researcher called in to help out, and Jennifer Ehle as a government researcher.

Interestingly, the movie has a few riffs on how such an outbreak might play out on the political front that tweak both the left and the right ends of the spectrum. There's some heartless corporations (are there any other kind in the movies?) looking to cash in, and at one point the nurses' union goes on strike, leaving dying patients in the lurch. Not to mention miles of government red tape to be sheared through.

Sounds crazy, but don't forget that part of the reason behind the slow response to Hurricane Katrina was that volunteer emergency workers were forced to sit through sexual harassment training before being sent to the Gulf.

"Contagion" uses an extreme situation to show us the breadth of our ragged humanity, its grace and its grubby failings. I just wish the movie could have been able to connect with hearts as well as it does heads.

3 stars out of four