Review: "Irresistible"

I always thought Jon Stewart was overrated as a TV fake news host, but he’s turning out to be a pretty decent filmmaker.

His fine directorial effort, “Rosewater,” had an international backdrop and didn’t get seen by too many people. Stewart’s second, “Irresistible,” is a sharp political satire that takes aim at the money, hype and competition-for-competition’s-sake mentality that drives our electoral system.

Political comedy/dramas are a fraught cinematic subspecies that’s been historically hit or miss, and as a result have fallen out of favor these days. “Long Shot,” “Vice” and “The Campaign” are the only ones I can immediately recall from the last few years, and they range from decent-ish to plain awful.

Stewart (who also wrote the screenplay) manages to avoid a big pitfall by casting Steve Carell as the lead, a scheming Democratic campaign veteran named Gary Zimmer. Gary represents pretty much everything wrong with American politics, and yet we can’t help liking him. It’s tough to march through an entire movie not being able to stand your main character.

As the story opens, the Hillary Clinton campaign has crashed to earth and the Democratic party is in a shambles, looking for any kind of win. Gary, who used to work for Bill, comes up with the idea of backing a conservative-leaning candidate in the heartland to show everybody the Dems can have a broad tent that includes guys with pickups and rifles.

When Jack Hastings (Chris Cooper) makes an impassioned speech at his town council about not excluding illegal immigrants and a video of it goes viral, Gary knows he’s found his man. Jack looks straight of central casting in the Gary Cooper mold -- a farmer, retired Marine colonel and widower, doesn’t talk a lot but is a fountain of homespun wisdom when he does.

(Though I’ve never met a farmer who uses that much hair product.)

Soon Gary has arrived in tiny Deerwaken, Wis., to convince Jack to run for mayor against the incumbent (Brent Sexton). Jack resists, but agrees on one condition: that Gary himself run the campaign. Soon Gary has brought his entire army of high-priced consultants, pollsters and other experts to run a Senate-level campaign in a town of 5,000 people.

The first half or so of the movie is fun and light and terrific. Stewart gleefully mocks pretty much everybody, from both political parties to the hapless media, who are depicted as being like that dog from “Up” -- clueless and easily distracted. Meanwhile, the townsfolk are authentic and humble and nice as pie.

I appreciated “Irresistible” for not always choosing the most obvious direction, like having Gary go all “Local Hero” and fall in love with the backward ways (to jet-setters like him) of Wisconsin. There’s also a bit of romantic interest with Jack’s plucky daughter, Diana (Mackenzie Davis), who likes to point out Gary’s condescending ways with a smile and some light flirting. She’s a lot younger than Gary, but Hollywood has its ways of glossing over such things.

Probably the film’s biggest failing is re-introducing the character of Faith Brewster, an utterly soulless GOP operative played by Rose Byrne. She beat Gary in the last election, and midway through the movie arrives with her own forces to put down Jack’s nascent campaign, because apparently flipping one mayoral seat in Wisconsin will start a national trend, or something.

Gary and Faith once had a thing with each other, so it immediately becomes a tit-for-tat exchange -- Faith brings in some big-name donors, so Gary does too, etc. Lots of insults and sexual innuendo fly around. It all has a very sitcom-y feel and belongs in another, lesser movie.

Holding it all together is Carell, who has that rare, mysterious ability to play off-putting (“The Office”) or even nasty (“Vice”) characters and come across as appealing. Gary is a jerk, but (unlike Faith) he’s a jerk who doesn’t realize he’s being a jerk, and if it’s pointed out to him can be redeemed, if only for a while.

Stewart gets a little preachy and self-righteous toward the end because, well, he’s Jon Stewart and that’s his bag. But missteps aside I found “Irresistible” to be a fun, smart and even occasionally delightful send-up of a problem everybody sees but pretends not to.

Video review: "Little Women"

It’s a strange thing today where people can’t accept that you merely like a film -- you must love it.

Every year I have movies I adore that other people just think are pretty good or even so-so. “Harriet” is a prime example from 2019. More commonly, films that the consensus of critic and audiences insist are great I find admirable but hardly exceptional.

The most recent Best Picture Oscar winner, “Parasite,” is one of these. Another that many lamented didn’t make a bigger splash during the awards cycle was “Little Women.”

Perhaps it was because I found writer/director Greta Gerwig’s first effort behind the camera, “Lady Bird,” so extravagantly original and vibrant that her follow-up feels like a bit of a letdown. Having her choose as her sophomore effort to make the eighth adaptation of a 150-year-old novel struck me as uninspiring and unchallenging.

What did Gerwig bring to the table that couldn’t be found in the last high-profile adaptation a quarter-century ago with Winona Ryder as the proto-feminist budding writer, Jo March? Nothing that I could see.

The one bit of innovation that others have lauded, Gerwig’s use of parallel storytelling to jump back and forth in time between the first and second sections of the novel by Louisa May Alcott, many found confusing or off-putting.

Saoirse Ronan plays Jo, the headstrong of four daughters of the Marches, a well-regarded but economically struggling family from Concord. Father is away fighting in the Civil War, mother Marmee (Laura Dern) is saintly and supportive, eldest child Meg (Emma Watson) is in a hurry to marry, youngest Amy (Florence Pugh) feels overshadowed by Jo and the pure-hearted Beth (Eliza Scanlen) loves music and is destined to die.

(Sorry, no spoiler warnings extend back as far as 1868.)

Next door live the wealthy Laurences, with Chris Cooper as the stern patriarch whose heart softens in friendship to the Marches. Timothée Chalamet plays his grandson, Laurie, a spoiled brat who the March girls go ga-ga over. Laurie pitches his woo at Jo, who haughtily refuses in order to pursue her ambitions as a writer in New York... though things have a way of turning.

This is a gorgeous-looking film, filled with bright faces and colorful costumes and tables heaped with glistening food. (Though one keeps wondering exactly how indigent the Marches really are.)

“Little Women” is a well-made film with an engaging cast. It’s also the sort of movie where characters tend to just speak the underlying themes of the movie rather than acting them out and letting us come around on our own. For me that’s an easy line to draw between the merely good and truly exemplary.

Video extras are quite nice, consisting of six making-of featurettes:

• “A New Generation of Little Women”
• “Making a Modern Classic”
• “Greta Gerwig: Women Making Art”
• “Hair & Make-Up Test Sequence”
• “Little Women Behind the Scenes”
• “Orchard House, Home of Louisa May Alcott”

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Review: "LIttle Women"

I’ve never read “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott, and I think that hurts my perception of the latest cinematic adaptation of it by writer/director Greta Gerwig. (The eighth, it is believed.) I was a huge fan of Gerwig’s debut film, “Ladybird,” and although I liked this one, too, I couldn’t escape the feeling I was a tourist wandering through this story.

Alcott’s seminal semi-autobiographical tale follows the four March sisters as they progress from girls to young women, struggle with their places in 19th century society and their various romantic and familial entanglements. Jo March (Saoirse Ronan) is more or less the lead character, a headstrong proto-feminist who wants to be a writer first and a wife maybe never.

I had not realized that the book was published in two volumes, or that Alcott actually produced a pair of sequels. Gerwig’s screenplay juxtaposes the two sections, set seven years apart, using parallel storylines with the March sisters roughly occupying their teen years during the first and 20s during the second.

In addition to Ronan, who also was Gerwig’s star in “Ladybird,” the cast is uniformly superb. Emma Watson plays oldest daughter, Meg, who yearns to be an actress but embraces the push to marry and have children. Florence Pugh is Amy, the youngest and most willful child, who seethes in Jo’s shadow. Beth (Eliza Scanlen) is the wan one who loves music and has the purest heart, so we all know her fate.

Laura Dern plays their mother, aka “Marmee,” who seems impossibly upbeat and saintly but is allowed a few moments of eye-level humanity. Bob Odenkirk turns up late as their father, perennially away serving in the Civil War and not very consequential to the story even when he is around.

The Marches call themselves poor, though they have a nice, large house in Concord and a servant, and give away astonishing piles of food to the truly indigent. Their next-door neighbors are the super-wealthy Laurences, acquaintances who eventually become friends. Chris Cooper plays the patriarch, whose sternness fades after he takes a shine to Beth. Timothée Chalamet plays his layabout grandson Theodore aka “Laurie,” the object of myriad affections.

With his foppy hair, pencil-thin frame and insolent eyes -- if he were a March, he'd unquestionably be the prettiest sister -- Chalamet is the very picture of unearned privilege. He convinces Jo that he loves her, though we sense that emotionally Laurie is a renter, not a buyer. She rejects him, though later comes to regret it.

In the early scenes the March house practically hums with warmth and energy, while in the later sequences it has become drab and colorless. The family suffers setbacks and heartbreak, but carries on.

In the later section, Jo has moved to New York City to work to pursue a career as a writer, with some success. Tracy Letts plays the publisher who mercilessly cuts her pages and encourages her to write short, pulpy stories in which single women are dead or married by the end. “Either one will do.”

Meryl Streep plays their wealthy Aunt March, who could help them a lot more than she does, though she does offer some employment to the daughters and stresses the importance of marrying well. She’s distraught when Meg falls for John Brooke (James Norton), a penniless tutor. Louis Garrel enters the picture late as Friedrich, a romantic alternative for Jo.

I can see why generations of women have grown up loving “Little Women,” because it embraces them as they are and shows how crushing expectations can be, then or now. We instinctively like Jo because she rejects the wife-or-spinster dichotomy and forges her own path. We understand Amy’s impatience and admire Marmee’s innate generosity of the heart.

The movie tells women it’s OK to embrace a family life, or reject it, fall for boys or shove them away, feel strong but sometimes vulnerable, too. “Girls should go out into the world and make up their own minds about things,” Aunt March says.

If I were a woman or an Alcott reader, I’d probably love this film instead of just admiring it.

Review: "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"

If you’re expecting a biopic of Fred Rogers, then “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” is not it.

You will leave the theater not knowing much more about Rogers than you did going in, assuming you watched the iconic “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” show as a child, or even just saw the solid documentary about him from last year, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”

No, this is more movie-making as therapy. Director Marielle Heller (“Can You Ever Forgive Me?”) and screenwriters Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster are aiming to summon Rogers’ spirit and spread his ethos, that each and every person is precious, across the globe.

Tom Hanks gives a superlative performance that makes a conscious choice not to do an impersonation of Rogers. Physically there’s not much resemblance, and Hanks eschews that reedy little country priest voice Rogers used to speak to generations of children over the decades his show was on PBS.

Rogers isn’t even the protagonist in his own movie, that role being delegated to Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), the journalist charged with profiling him circa 1998. It’s a fairly common trope for modern movies to include a storyteller character as a stand-in for the audience, asking the questions they’d like to ask and acting as an avatar for their emotional reactions.

But in this case, Lloyd isn’t just telling Rogers’ story; he’s the receptacle of his ministrations. This is a movie about a writer who had his life changed by the person he was writing about. If this film were a sentence, Lloyd is the subject and Rogers is the object.

Essentially, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” is an extended cinematic group session. We are collectively blessed by Mr. Rogers to accept his wisdom, go forth and be neighborly.

This isn’t necessarily meant as criticism, though I suspect I didn’t love “Neighborhood” as much as most people will. This is the ultimate laughter-and-tears sort of filmmaking that tends to be very successful at the box office and during the awards season.

It’s just that this is the kind of movie that sets out to do a certain thing, and it does that thing very well, and people will leave it grateful for the thing they were expecting it to do. I felt fulfilled and utterly unsurprised.

Lloyd works at Esquire magazine as an investigative reporter. Professionally he’s riding high but has earned a reputation as a hard-to-get-along jerk; personally he is married and recently became a father late in life. Susan Kelechi Watson plays his wife, Andrea, who deeply loves Lloyd but also recognizes in him fault lines, a physical and emotional absence, that could threaten their nascent family’s stability.

Lloyd is assigned to write a 400-word piece on Rogers for the magazine’s issue on heroes, which is the sort of thing a newspaper reporter would be expected to crank out in half a day but here becomes a weeks-long odyssey with multiple trips to Pittsburgh to interview Rogers.

Rogers instantly treats him with kindness and familiarity, turning the conversation around to focus on the journalist rather than the interviewee. It seems most of Lloyd’s trauma involves Jerry (Chris Cooper), his father, though Lloyd stubbornly refuses to use this label. Jerry ran out on the family a long time ago and now seeks some kind of reconciliation.

The background is filled with many lovely bit parts. I especially liked Christine Lahti as Lloyd’s supportive-yet-demanding editor; Wendy Makkena as Dorothy, Jerry’s girlfriend who helped him put the pieces back together; and Enrico Colantoni as Bill, the right-hand man who’s always at Rogers’ side, part gofer and part watchdog.

I found interesting the film’s depiction of the production of Rogers’ show, which is like a carefully oiled machine of well-worn parts. The Pittsburgh crew is old-timers who love Fred while also being slightly exasperated by his ambling, schedule-be-damned ways. They know they’re not breaking any new ground but are focused on doing what they do as well as it can be done.

Much the same can be said of “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”

I admit part of my reaction may be colored by the TV show itself, which ran from 1968 to 2001 (with a short, unremembered break in the ‘70s.) Though it’s now sacrilege to say such things, the truth is that, even as a small child who most needed to hear the message of self-love that Mr. Rogers spun so earnestly, I found his show terribly boring.

I know, I know…

A Generation X-er saying you didn’t like “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” is like being a Baby Boomer who found Woodstock to be just a concert, or the Beatles a great band but a trifle overrated. (Stage whisper: both are true.)

So you can hate me, and love this movie, but I will remain deeply in like with you both.

Video review: "Cars 3"

“Cars 3” didn’t do too well at the box office compared to other Pixar animated flicks, so in all likelihood it will stand as the last in the series. I’m fine with that.

The movie is a conscious closing of the loop, as brash race car Lightning McQueen (voice of Owen Wilson) finds himself in the same tires… er, shoes as his mentor, Doc Hudson. He’s now the old racer struggling against upstarts in a sport that no longer seems to want him around.

Armie Hammer provides the voice of Jackson Storm, a “next gen” racer who’s fast, relentless and uncaring. Soon Storm clones have booted all of Lightning’s old opponents to the curb, and he survives a major crash not unlike the one that ended Doc’s career. He goes into a rehab program at a fancy modern facility where his chirpy trainer, Cruz Ramirez (Cristela Alonzo), embraces him as her “senior project.”

It’s more wistful and contemplative than its two predecessors, particularly the fun-but-zany “Cars 2,” which was essentially one long Benny Hill skit with hillbilly tow truck Mater front and center. This film is about the aging process, how we deal with rough patches in life, and passing the torch to a worthy successor. In the most moving sequence, Lightning looks up some of Doc’s old friends to find inspiration.

There is still plenty of time for racing action and goofy fun, such as when Lightning finds himself caught in a backwoods demolition derby against a killer school bus, Miss Fritter.

“Cars 3” doesn’t have the pure entertainment horsepower of the first two movies, but it’s sadder and wiser.

Bonus features are excellent, though most of them come with the Blu-ray edition. The DVD has a feature-length commentary track featuring director Brian Fee and his creative team, plus a short animated film, “Lou.”

Upgrade to the Blu-ray and you add a new mini-movie featuring that smashmouth bus, “Miss Fritter’s Racing Skoool.” There are also five deleted scenes and eight featurettes touching on various aspects of production, including “My First Car,” an illustrated gallery of cast and crew talking about their first vehicle.

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Review: "Cars 3"

“Cars 3” is a movie of full circles coming round.

It’s amusing, glitzy entertainment for kids that also ponders what happens when we get old and start to worry about life passing us by. We’re going so fast, and suddenly you find yourself sitting in a pasture, unsure if you drove yourself in or were put out.

I can’t think of a film series that better incorporates the death of one of its stars into the core themes of the story. Paul Newman was the beating heart of the original “Cars” as the cantankerous Doc Hudson, who sets aside his ancient grievances against the sport of racing to coach a cocky young upstart, Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson).

In a lot of ways, it was as much Doc’s story as McQueen’s.

Doc is very much on Lightning’s mind as the film opens, using his lessons and inspiration to become a living legend himself. He’s essentially traded places with Strip “The King” Weathers, the aging champion from the first movie, having to deal with an upstart rookie trying to take his crown. Except in this case, it’s not just one opponent but the entire field of competitors.

Jackson Storm (Armie Hammer) is a “next gen” racer, and looks the part -- few curves, efficiently unpretty, a sleek personification of function over form. He drives like an automaton, straight down the groove, no risks and lots of speed. He also has little patience for old-timers like McQueen, brusquely shoving the old generation to the side.

Soon, all the older racers have been replaced by Storm clones, and Lightning suffers a major crash just like Doc did. Can he come back and race again, or has his time gone by?

Brian Fee, a Pixar animation veteran, ably takes the director’s chair for the first time, with a screenplay by Mike Rich, Pixar do-everything-guy Bob Peterson and Kiel Murray, one of the writers on the original “Cars.” Their entry into the franchise stands out from the other two movies by taking some left turns we don’t expect.

It doesn’t quite have the emotional horsepower of the first one or the dizzy Mater-centric antics of “Cars 2.” But I think most people, young and old, will find it a satisfying iteration – possibly conclusion? – of the saga.

It is a little disappointing to mostly leave the Radiator Springs crew behind this time, including Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), Sally (Bonnie Hunt), Luigi (Tony Shalhoub), Ramone (Cheech Marin) and the rest. But they make a few appearances, and there are new faces.

Most notable is Cruz Ramirez (Cristela Alonzo), a hyperactive young “race trainer” who wants to whip Lightning back into shape with computer simulations and kooky psychological motivations. She sees him as her “senior project,” and prescribes lots of naps and an oil drip pan as needed. Watching over is Sterling (Nathan Fillion), the seemingly benevolent new owner of the Rust-Eze race sponsors.

(The Magliozzi brothers of NPR “Car Talk” fame, who did the voices of their animated counterparts, get their own nice little sendoff.)

And there’s a sentimental journey to Doc’s old dirt-track stomping grounds, where Lighting encounters the mentor of his mentor, Smokey (a pitch-perfect Chris Cooper), and a few other old-school racers. Plus a madcap dash through a demolition derby where Miss Fritter (Lea DeLaria), a smashmouth school bus, always steals the show.

You can quibble with some of the particulars of the plot, including a rather… novel take on racing rules that I don’t think NASCAR is going to incorporate anytime soon. But its heart is never far from the right place.

I should mention that Newman’s character and voice appear in this movie, flashbacks from the original but also a few lines of dialogue that were recorded and never used. It’s great to hear that beautiful gravel baritone again, and we learn some things about Doc we didn’t know. It’s like hearing new stories about your departed father, told by people who adored him.

Happily, this means that “Cars 3” will stand as Newman’s final official film credit. A lifelong car nut, I don’t think he would mind.

The movie itself is a lot like classic cars. They don’t have the power they used to. But oh, to watch them go by…

Review: "Live By Night"

“Live By Night” is Ben Affleck’s conscious attempt to recreate the look and feel of an Old Hollywood crime drama with a modern frosting of sex and violence. It’s an overstuffed, messy narrative filled with a lot of terrific actors and strong scenes lacking connective tissue.

This movie is Full Boat Affleck: in addition to starring as a Boston Irish mobster transplanted to Tampa Bay to run their Prohibition Era operations, he also directs, produces and adapted the novel by Dennis Lehane.

All I can say is Affleck certainly knows how to shoot himself as a director, and how to shoot himself in the foot as a screenwriter.

Cary Grant himself would have to admit how dapper Affleck looks in this movie, his dark, chiseled features set off by 1920s costumes and backdrops. Robert Richardson’s photography recalls the best of the film noir tradition while employing diffuse colors and slanted light.

The story is… the sort of thing you get trying to cram a 400-page book into a two-hour movie. Though I haven’t read Lehane’s book, from what I’ve gathered it seems Affleck tried to follow the novel pretty closely, ejecting only a brief sojourn to Cuba. He would have done better to scale down the sheer number of secondary characters and tertiary plot lines.

Affleck plays Joe Coughlin, the son of a Boston police captain who went bad and became a thief. He runs into trouble when he romances the moll (Sienna Miller) of his boss, a pugnacious fellow named Albert White (Robert Glenister). A few hops and skips of the plot later, and after a stint in prison, Joe finds himself sent down to Ybor City, Fla., to take over the illicit liquor operations of his new Italian mob masters.

Joe and his partner, Dion (an excellent Chris Messina), soon put the locals on notice that there’s a new boss in town, offing some low-level hicks and even befriending the local sheriff (Chris Cooper), a deeply religious man who compartmentalizes his faith with the desire to keep the peace. Joe falls for a vivacious Cuban expat, Graciella (Zoe Saldana), and soon it seems like his snake-eyes luck is starting to change.

But challenges always abound, including pushback from a vicious local leader of the Klan (Matthew Maher), who just happens to be the sheriff’s kin. And the Italians up north aren’t satisfied that the booze business is booming, but want Joe to branch out into gambling, prostitution, drugs, etc. That means stepping on more toes in his new beachside paradise.

Elle Fanning plays the sheriff’s daughter, who gets used up in a bad way when she tries to make a go in showbiz, and returns to town preaching about the evils of men like Joe in a series of burgeoning tent revivals. One of the film’s main problems is that even though his character seems to be at the center of Joe’s thicket of problems, Chris Cooper doesn’t actually get a lot of screen time to flesh out his conflict.

We pretty much know where all this is heading, so it’s just a matter of drinking in the atmosphere and encounters before the movie winds up where it will. Lehane’s work tends to start in tragedy, then wander around a bit before returning home.

There are a lot of great puzzle pieces in “Live By Night,” but it feels like there’s too many and they don’t always fit together.

Video review: "The Amazing Spider-Man 2"

Sophomore slumps are an unfortunate reality for plenty of big-budget sequels, and that includes “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.” It’s still an enjoyable comic book flick featuring everyone’s favorite web-slinger, but it can’t muster the verve and pizzazz of its predecessor.

Its main problem is an overabundance of characters and plot. The best super-hero movies tend to focus on a single villain or existentialist threat, but here we’ve got storylines splayed all over the place like random spider webs.

Peter Parker/Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield) has to deal with at least three bad guys, including his best friend Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) slowly turning into the Green Goblin and Paul Giamatti rampaging (briefly) as the Rhino.

The main heavy is Jamie Foxx as Max, a shy social outcast who idolizes Spidey. He gets zapped by some electrical eels and turned into a living power generator who dubs himself Electro – with his emotions clearing having no voltage regulator.

Foxx makes for a terrific villain, a man deluded by his own quest for power, and compares favorably with Alfred Molina’s Dr. Octopus from the last Spider-Man iteration. But he’s not given enough screen time to fully flesh out the character. Similarly, the Harry/Peter and Green Goblin/Spider-Man twin conflicts show just enough promise to suggest they deserved their own movie to fully explore.

On top of all these super-villains to fight, Peter’s got a lot weighing on his shoulders: a will they/won’t they romance with Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), guilt over the death of Gwen’s cop father, tensions with Aunt May (Sally Field), and the mystery of Peter’s disappeared parents.

The CG action scenes are still a blast, but sometimes less really is more. A more focused film would’ve been a better one.

Fortunately, the video extras are first-rate. The DVD comes with four deleted scenes with commentary by director Marc Webb, a feature length commentary track, and the “It’s On Again” music video with Alicia Keys.

Upgrade to the Blu-ray edition, and you add nine more deleted scenes and a comprehensive making-of documentary, “The Wages of Heroism: Making The Amazing Spider-Man 2.”

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Review: "The Amazing Spider-Man 2"

Just a short review today, folks. Joe is handling the main article over at The Film Yap, and ably so, so please head over there to check it out.

I was very cynical about the reboot of the Spider-Man franchise. As I wrote at the time, undertaking a production just so the creative rights to the character won't revert to the previous owner is a terrifically awful reason to make a movie. But director Marc Webb, his cast and crew came up with a fresh take on familiar characters and themes. It was exhilirating.

As I also wrote, "The Amazing Spider-Man" also took its time building up the mythology of their new-ish universe, grounding the characters and rendering them relatable as people. In other words, it earned its emotional capital for the kabloowie stuff later on.

With the sequel, I often felt like the filmmakers were using shorthand and shortcuts. Dialogue scenes barely begin before they reach their emotional crescendo. Action scenes jump straight to the big explosions and CG effects. There's no foreplay, just "hello" and wham-bang.

Maybe I'm getting old, but I need a film to stoke my fires a little bit before getting to the main event.

There are some wonderful actors in this movie -- Andrew Garfield, Jamie Foxx, Emma Stone, Chris Cooper, Sally Field, Paul Giamatti (briefly). But as I sat there watching them spout increasingly ridiculous and/or nonsensical lines, I kept wondering how ill-used they are. This movie fails the old Gene Siskel test if you'd rather just watch that same cast sitting around lunch talking about whatever.

It's not a bad super-hero movie. I think there's actually a really good story here, buried underneath the unnecessary subplots and excess of secondary characters. Peter Parker, haunted by the death of Gwen Stacy's father in the last movie, dithers about keeping his promise to leave her alone, despite their desperate love for each other.

The main bad guy is Electro (Foxx), depicted here as a mush-mouthed, timid electric engineer who gets zapped by experimental eels at the headquarters of the evil Oscorp company. This turns him into a blue-skinned, semi-transparent being who can manipulate electrical energy -- eventually, even dis- and re-assembling his body through electricity.

His motivations aren't really clear -- something about feeling invisible and wanting the whole world to see him. Previously a Spider-Man junkie, he becomes disillusioned when the web-slinger helps capture him.

The filmmakers also throw in Harry Osborn, played by Dane DeHaan, who was born looking like a fallen angel, with a cupid's-bow mouth and dangerous eyes. His nasty dad Norman (Cooper), on his death bed, passes along his contempt as well as the "Osborn curse," a heredity disease he describes as "retro-viral hypoplasia." Basically, it turns you into a gnarled green goblin.

One of my standard metrics for comic book movies is you can rate them by how many villains they have. The truly terrific ones, like "Spider-Man 2" or "Blade," only need one really good bad guy to make things sing. With Spidey fighting Electro, the Green Goblin and even the Rhino (briefly), none of them get a chance to make a weighty impact.

Various subplots involving Peter's parentage, and his father's prominence as a scientist in the Oscorp machine, were better left on the writers' floor. Aside from muddying up the plot, it serves to diminish Peter as a character. The entire resonance of Spider-Man is that he's a nobody teenager who assumes great powers and, as we all well know, great responsibilities.

So: I liked the movie in pieces. There's a lot of good stuff here, and certainly the action sequences are fun and all you'd expect from a big summer blockbuster. This one just needed a half-dozen or so more rewrites to pare it down to its essence, instead of piling on the detritus.

Review: "August: Osage County"

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Tracy Letts, who also penned the screenplay, “August: Osage County” is the sort of movie that shows its stage roots.

The action -- and by “action,” I mean people talking -- takes place in more or less a single location. There’s a certain showiness to the dialogue and performances, as if broadcasting to the back of the room. And it relies on two or three big, booming plot twists to carry the narrative, which by itself is rather meager.

This is the sort of movie that has close on to a dozen important characters, and every single one of them has at least one look-at-me moment where they get to have a big speech to deliver or an emotional crisis in which to wallow. For the minor characters, it practically feels like a checklist: “OK, here’s the timid son’s time in the spotlight.” The major players enjoy several of these.

All this isn’t to say “August” isn’t a thoroughly enjoyable cinematic experience. It is. It just doesn’t hold a grand sense of newness about itself. It feels like latter-day William Faulkner with a wink.

The film skates by on some pretty tremendous performances by some pretty amazing actors, starting with Meryl Streep. As family matriarch Violet Weston, Streep is like an Oklahoma tornado sweeping through her own house, hurling things this way and that. Suffering from mouth cancer and constantly addled by the many drugs she takes to address it, Violet feels no compunction about saying perfectly horrible things to anyone and everyone around here.

She saves her most venomous bile for her own clan. As the story opens her husband, Beverly (Sam Shepard), a noted poet, has died under mysterious circumstances, probably a suicide. As the family gathers to lay him to rest, it’s also an occasion to hash any number of squabbles, secrets and recriminations.

Oldest daughter Barbara (Julia Roberts) loathes the vindictive creature her mother has become, and fears she’s treading down the same path. Separated from her husband (Ewan McGregor) and estranged from their teen daughter (Abigail Breslin), she’s not spoiling for a fight with Violet, but she’s not about to back down from one, either.

The other two daughters are Karen (Juliette Lewis) and Ivy (Julianne Nicholson), both sporting man problems. Karen, brittle and self-deluded, has shown up with her latest beau, a glib sports car-driving business type (Dermot Mulroney). Ivy, the lonely child who stuck around to care for their parents, is resentful and reticent to share news about a new love.

I really enjoyed Margo Martindale as Violet’s sister, Mattie Fae, who has fewer sharp edges but hides a steely, mean streak underneath, and Chris Cooper as her husband Charles, a man with a tendency to smile through the pain. Their son Little Charles is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, a grown man with a childlike disposition and challenges.

Director John Wells is a TV guy whose only previous stint helming a feature film, “The Company Men,” was seen and appreciated by myself, and few others. He more or less hangs back and lets the actors rip, shrewing and harping and haranguing.

“August: Osage County” is a perfectly serviceable drama that’s worth a ticket, if only to see Meryl Streep’s latest masterwork. Even if she’s not always in the best movies, it’s hard to debate her status as the best film actor working today. She racks up Oscar nominations with astonishing regularity, and there’s a reason why.

Reeling Backward: "Seabiscuit" (2003)

I'm going to try something a little different for this edition of the Reeling Backward column. First of all, as you may notice I'm featuring "Seabiscuit," which came out in 2003. Though this is generally a spot for discussing classic films, I've always stated that I held the prerogative to decide exactly how far backward we shall reel. In this case, just nine short years.

Most importantly, though, I'm going to break down the ways in which the film, written and directed by Gary Ross, differs from the nonfiction book by Laura Hillenbrand. I've always been enamored of this movie, and meant to read the book for many years. I had sort of assumed that when you're dealing with such a well-researched, well-documented story like that of Seabiscuit, the movie would have to hold pretty closely to the historical record.

Having just completed the book, I was struck by the number of ways, large and small, that the film strays from what actually happened. So I'm going to document them, and discuss why I think the filmmakers changed things around for the movie adaptation. It's sort of a dissertation (or bloviation) on the screenwriting process.

Red's other injury

The brilliance of both Hillenbrand's book and Ross' film rests squarely on one thing, in my opinion: to make this the story of three men, each in some way broken, and how they were connected by a downtrodden, over-the-hill racehorse and found not just glory in the winner's circle, but redemption in their own lives.

As such, anything that deviates too much from the tale of the trio -- jockey Red Pollard, trainer Tom Smith and owner Charles Howard -- becomes problematic in terms of cinematic storytelling. Even a 2-1/2 hours film cannot cover everything in a 350-page book, so the primary challenge in adapting any written work to the screen is distilling it down to its purest essence.

The film faced an additional challenge with the real, complicated history. When Seabiscuit won his most important race, a match contest against the heavily favored Triple Crown winner War Admiral, he was ridden not by Pollard but George Woolf, perhaps the greatest jockey of his era. As depicted in the movie, Pollard had suffered a horrible leg injury while giving a workout to a horse owned by an old friend who was down on his luck.

But in actuality, Red suffered two serious career-threatening injuries. While riding a mare owned by Howard, he suffered a horrifying crash and had his chest crushed by the horse. It was only while he was preparing his comeback that the leg incident occurred.

This is a classic example of a screenwriter combining events or characters for the sake of simplicity. If you have a character suffer a sickening injury, it shocks the audience. But if they turn right around again and have another awful spill, it takes away the dramatic impact of the first injury. Now he seems not just unlucky but cursed. An audience will have sympathy for a character who suffers, but not for one who never gets a break. It's the line between compassion and pity, the latter of which is not a good way for your audience to regard a main character.

Horses and riders

There's another very important reason why the film omits Pollard's injury while riding another Howard horse. If this is the story about the special bond three men have with the same horse, then you can't have other horses horning in on the relationship.

In the film, Seabiscuit has one rider, until Pollard is injured, then Woolf takes over for awhile until Pollard comes back for the triumphant race at the end. But while the horse had only two riders (as far as the flick is concerned), the two riders rode other horses -- many of them. As Hillenbrand describes in the book, jockeys in the 1930s were essentially independent contractors who moved from horse to horse according to their luck and the shifting situation. While a typical racehorse might participate in 40 races in their entire career, a top jockey might ride in that many in a couple of months. It was not at all unusual from them to run multiple races in one day.

So even while Pollard was riding Seabiscuit, he was riding other horses -- including others from the Howard stable. The movie makes it seem as if Seabiscuit was the only racehorse Howard owned. Smith the trainer was training other horses, too. In fact, major stables are a lot like factories, with new horses being constantly foaled or acquired, aging horses retired out to stud, and young colts and mares developing to replace the current stars. The Biscuit was the top but certainly not the only horse in the game.

Again, from a storytelling perspective the logic here is pretty straightforward. You don't want Pollard and Woolf to seem like mercenaries. They weren't -- both considered Seabiscuit the best horse they ever rode, or saw, according to the book. And you don't want Smith and Howard to seem like barons overseeing a village of horses, even benevolently.

By cutting out any mention of other horses, it makes the connection with Seabiscuit seem that much more special.

The 100-grander

Along those same lines, the movie has two big races that form the dramatic high points: the match race with War Admiral, and the Santa Anita Handicap, known as the "100-grander" for its (for the time) enormous cash prize. Pollard and Seabiscuit lose the 1937 Santa Anita due to a mistake by Red -- another horse closes up on the jockey's blind side (more on that later) and beats them at the wire.

From then on, the 100-grander is presented as their "white whale" -- the big one that got away. After the Biscuit is himself injured and makes an unlikely return to racing, the 1940 Santa Anita becomes their big comeback, and the film's concluding triumph.

But actually, another horse owned by Charles Howard, Kayak, won the 100-grander in 1939, when Seabiscuit was convalescing.

In the book, Howard openly expresses his regret that it was not his top horse who won the '39 race. But still, it's hard in a movie to have a big finale be such a huge emotional catharsis when another horse from the same stable, trained by the same trainer, already won the Big Race.

The movie is generally faithful to Seabiscuit's running style -- he was a "stalking horse" who rarely broke out of the gate well, but ran down the lead horse when it began to tire. But they cheat on the last race at Santa Anita, showing him lagging and falling all the way to the back of the pack before coming from behind to win it.

In reality, the Biscuit never ran lower than third place during the race. But from a dramatic standpoint, it adds to the story of the Little Horse That Could, when everyone thought his return to racing after a serious injury was ill-advised, for ignominious failure to loom so closely.

It was also not Seabiscuit's first race back -- he ran a handful of others before the 1940 100-grander, winning one of them.

"I can't see out there!"

Speaking of Pollard's blind spot: Hillenbrand makes it quite clear that if the fact ever got out that Red had no vision in his right eye, his jockeying career would have ceased immediately. No race official would let him on a track, and any trainer or owner who knowingly allowed a half-blind rider on their horse would probably be banned, too.

So it's highly unlikely that Pollard would have told Smith and Howard, as he does in the movie, about his blindness. And even if he had, they would have felt compelled to turn him in, if only to protect their own positions.

In fact, apparently the only person Red told about his impairment was his wife. (Red had a wife?!? Yep. See next.)

From a cinematic standpoint, having Pollard confess his deepest darkest secret only strengthens the bond between the three men. The movie also romanticizes how Red lost his sight, attributing it to being punched too many times while moonlighting as a boxer during his early, lean years.

While it's true that Red fought in the ring, he lost his vision through pure, dull accident -- he was practicing a horse when a stone in the turf flipped up and smacked him in the head. Not terribly sexy.

Red's wife and early life

One of the biggest omissions in "Seabiscuit" is that during his long recovery from his injuries, Red Pollard fell in love with his nurse and proposed to her. They were already married by the time he won the Santa Anita Handicap. She stood by him all during his subsequent declining years, after he washed out as a budding trainer and went back to jockeying in the bush leagues.

So why leave her out? I would say it comes down to pure economy of storytelling. Again, the movie is about three men redeemed by an amazing horse. Although you could write it so his commitment to hearth and home is part of his character's evolution from proud loner to someone who relies on and is relied upon by others, you already accomplish that with the horse as the medium. You'd have to spend at least several scenes building up that relationship, and with the movie already clocking in close to 150 minutes, the wife becomes expendable. Also, that would have augmented the amount of screen time spent on Pollard, overbalancing the three-legged story triad.

The film cheats on Howard and Smith's families, too. Though the movie (and to a lesser extent the book) seems to suggest that Tom Smith is a mystery man who just rode in off the plains one day, he had a wife and children. In fact, his son was a trainer in his own right, and actually trained horses for Charles Howard's son, Lin. There's a whole chapter of the book devoted to a foul-plagued race between Seabiscuit and Lin's horse, hyped as a "fathers vs. sons" affair.

The movie also plays with the timeline of the death of one of Howard's other sons, making it seem as if it preceded his interest in horse racing fairly closely. That accident actually happened many years earlier.

There's also the timeline of Red's young life. The film shows his father buying him his own horse at the age of 16. Some time later after the stock market crash, the now-destitute Pollards leave young Red in the care of a horseman -- this would have been at about age 18.

In reality, Red was already a seasoned jockey by that age, at a time when it was not unusual for "bug boys," as fledgling riders were called, to start riding at 15, 14 or even younger. His parents arranged for a family member to be his chaperon, but the man promptly abandoned Red to his own devices.

The filmmakers rejiggered things here because the idea of a 15-year-old kid so wantonly kicked to the curb by the grown-ups in his family would be a major turn-off to the audience. Remember: compassion, not pity.

Grogless

The movie spends only a little bit of time on Smith's reticence to talk to the press. In fact, he was fiercely secretive, working out his horse in the middle of the night to avoid scrutiny, and even playing games with the press and the public to misdirect them away from the Biscuit.

It went so far that Smith had Howard purchase Seabiscuit's brother, Grog, who had nothing of his speed or spirit but looked exactly like him. Smith used Grog as a decoy so much that it was said that only he and some of the grooms knew for sure which horse was being paraded around as the mighty Seabiscuit at any given time. Even Howard was fooled on several occasions.

So, thousands of people and reporters who'd traveled far and waited long to catch a glimpse of the famous Seabiscuit were often really staring at a counterfeit.

Movie-wise, the reason for omitting this is simple: It's OK for Smith to seem taciturn and stubborn, but you don't want him to look like a total dick.

Except...

The one sequence where the movie does show Smith working his horse out in the middle of the night was in preparations for the match race with War Admiral. It depicts them working to train Seabiscuit to begin without a starting gate, using a bell as a cue. It makes for some powerfully disquieting scenes of Pollard, still fragile from his shattered leg, riding around the track in total darkness.

But Smith did all of this training for the match race out in the open, during the daytime for everyone to see. The press witnessed and reported on the progress. Smith generally only worked his horses in secret in order to score a low "impost," or carrying weight from the track official. Since the match race was only against one other horse, who were agreed to carry the same weight, there was no benefit in training in secret.

Also, the movie plays a little footsie with that starting bell. It shows Smith and Pollard offering to buy a bell from the local fire department. At the time of the race, Smith sneaks the jury-rigged contraption up to the starter's booth so it gets used as the actual bell to begin the race.

In actuality, Smith built his makeshift bell out of an old alarm clock and some wood planks. And the starters really did use it to begin the race, but only because the official bell wouldn't work. Hillenbrand slyly suggests that Smith may have had something to do with sabotaging the track bell so the one Seabiscuit trained with would be the one used for the race. Again, this is the difference between gamesmanship and being a dick.

Weighing the weights

A huge part of the game-within-the-game of horseracing is imposts -- the amount of weight a horse carries, including jockey, saddle and lead weights. Short version: horses with winning records and big reputations were assigned higher weights than less successful horses. The difference could be 30 pounds or more -- an astonishing  handicap where every extra pound of weight can translate to a horse length over the course of a race.

This would be the equivalent of boxers from different weight classes being forced to fight each other, or one team of baseball players being allowed to use corked bats and greased balls, or weaker golf players getting to use the closer tees. Reading the book, it was astonishing to me that any sport can allow such an obvious and meaningful disadvantage to be pinned to its best athletes.

As described in the novel, owners and trainers spent a huge portion of their time strategizing how to get their horses assigned lower imposts. Howard and Smith on several occasions scratched Seabiscuit from races at the last minute because they felt the high weight assigned would either doom his chances of a win, or risk an injury.

At first I was puzzled by the notion of such an important aspect of the strategy of horseracing being left out. But what it comes down to is not wanting Team Seabiscuit to look like a bunch of whiners. Sports heroes are not allowed, at least in the movies, to complain about the advantages enjoyed by their opponents.

On a similar note, in reality Seabiscuit was not a "mudder" -- a horse adept at running well in wet track conditions. Indeed, he was quite poor at it. Hillenbrand notes again and again in her book that it was Seabiscuit's Achilles heel: his only real weakness as a racehorse. Smith and Howard scratched the Biscuit from plenty of races they deemed too wet, raising the ire of the press and the paying public.

The War of the Biscuit

Which brings us to the big showdown between Seabiscuit and War Admiral, the dramatic peak of the film. Here, Ross plays quite fast and loose with the facts in order to build up the cinematic showdown.

He accurately shows Howard trying everything to set up a match race between the Admiral, the best horse in the East, and Seabiscuit, who ruled the West. What the movie doesn't depict is that there actually was a race set between the two, with all the parties agreed -- but Seabiscuit was scratched due to an injury. Then there were other, regular races with a full field that included both champions, but weather or injuries led to one horse or the other scratching.

Not too hard to figure out the reasoning here -- the bumpy reality giving way to the smooth-building dramatic tension in the movie version.

The film also does a lot to build up the physical dominance of War Admiral: he was taller than the relatively small Seabiscuit, was beautiful to look at compared to the Biscuit's mottled "cow pony" looks, and had the regal bearing of a high-bred champion. Smith goes so far as to call Admiral "a monster" when scouting him before their race.

Reality check: though shorter, Seabiscuit was more muscular, possessed a wider chest and in fact outweighed the Admiral substantially.

Another thing "Seabiscuit" fails to mentioned: the two horses were closely related. In fact, though he was a couple years older Seabiscuit was War Admiral's nephew. They were both descended from the great Man O' War -- War Admiral directly, while the Biscuit was his grandson. They also shared some of their forebearer's personality traits, including stubbornness and a streak of rebelliousness.

So why paper over the horses' similarities? Easy -- when you're making somebody out to the be the Bad Guy, you want him to be seen as The Other: strange, frightening, exotic and threatening.

I should mention that after examining all these variances with the book, I still greatly admire "Seabiscuit" the movie. Though some of Ross' changes might seem like egregious affronts to the historical record, filmmaking sometimes is about changing around the facts to leave the "inner" truth  unobscured by pesky realities.

3.5 stars out of four

Video review: "The Muppets"

The Muppets are back, and now they're Oscar-winning Muppets!

The successful reboot of the dormant puppet franchise of Jim Henson is a joyous walk down memory lane for Generation X kids like me who grew up on Kermit, Missy Piggy, Fozzie Bear and the rest of the gang. Now they can bring their own moppets to see the Muppets, and the cinematic circle of life is competed.

The film even picked up an Academy Award for best song (though I am compelled to point out it only had one competitor, in one of the weakest contests in Oscar history).

Jason Segal and Amy Adams are the human stars, though they're mostly just hanging around to set up the Muppets and their antics. (Segal also co-wrote the screenplay.) The running gag is that the Muppets are washed up and forgotten, until their old theater in Los Angeles is scheduled to be demolished by an evil oil tycoon (Chris Cooper), who thinks there's black gold underneath it.

The new character is Walter (voiced by Peter Linz), a Muppet who grew up with humans and thinks he is one, too. He's always been obsessed with Kermit & Co., and gets a chance to track down his old heroes and bring them back together for the proverbial One Last Show.

Director James Bobin goes for a blend of high and low humor -- pratfalls and silliness for the kiddies, and wry puns and breaking of the fourth wall for their parents. It's a good mix, and it's good to see the old gang again.

Video extras are quite good, though you have to ante up for the Blu-ray combo edition to get most of the best stuff. The DVD comes with a single featurette, dubbed "The Longest Blooper Reel Ever Made."

Upgrade to the DVD/Blu-ray combo pack and you gain several more featurettes, including the full version of the rap song sung by villain Tex Richman. You also get deleted scenes, Easter eggs and audio commentary with the director and screenwriters.

Go for the three-disc "Wocka-Wocka Value Pack," and you add the musical soundtrack.
The feature that's the most fun: when you pause the Blu-ray, the Muppets take over the screen for a special "Disney intermission."

Movie: 3 stars out of four
Extras: 3 stars

Review: "The Muppets"

The recurring theme of "The Muppets" is that the whole gang hasn't seen each other for years, and all their fans have forgotten about them. They're trying to get back together for one last show, ostensibly to save their old theater from destruction but really to remind the world that they're still around, still funny and still capable of putting on a big to-do.

In reality, the return of Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy and the rest of the Muppets is charming and welcome reintroduction of the puppets created by Jim Henson decades ago (an early version of Kermit debuted in 1955). They haven't been forgotten so much as misplaced in weak movies and third-rate television appearances.

Rather than returning like a lot of other beloved children's franchises, spiffed up in CGI and modern attitudes -- "Alvin and the Chipmunks," "Garfield," "Yogi Bear" -- the Muppets are stubbornly old-school and kinda schmaltzy. They were a throwback to vaudeville even when the first Muppet movie came out in 1979, and now their boisterous singing and razzmatazz feels positively kitschy.

A whole generation of kids grew up on the Muppets, old enough now to bring their own children and catch up with Kermit & Co. The preview audience I attended of 30- and 40-something parents positively swayed with glee when the banjo strumming kicked off "Rainbow Connection."

Jason Segal is the Muppet savior, co-writing the script (with Nicholas Stoller) and starring as Gary. Segal, best known for R-rated comedies and adult-oriented television, mostly stays in the background and plays straight man, letting the Muppets take center stage.

Gary's brother is Walter (voiced by Peter Linz), who is obsessed with the Muppets and actually is one himself, although he doesn't seem to realize it. (One hint was a montage of their parents measuring their height, and Gary sprouts up while Walter never grows.) The stubborn conceit of the Muppets is that they're living creatures who don't know they have human hands manipulating them from the inside.

There appears to be little conscious attempt to age the Muppets or even acknowledge that the passage of time weighs on them. What exactly is the age span of frog made out of felt? Though it did seem to me that Fozzie Bear's eyebrows had acquired a touch of gray.

In the one nod to modern irony, there is plenty of breaking of the fourth wall, as the Muppets and their human tag-a-longs comment on the fact they are starring in a film. After assembling Kermit (voice of Steve Whitmire), Fozzie Bear (Eric Jacobson), Gonzo (Dave Goelz), and a few others, someone suggests that they save time by picking up the rest of the crew via musical montage.

I also guffawed when Gary's long-suffering girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) quips after the Muppets' pitch for a live telethon is turned down by every television studio in town: "This is going to be an awfully short movie!"

The heavy is Tex Richman, a wealthy oilman who's made an unlikely discovery of oil right beneath the Muppets' old Los Angeles theater. Chris Cooper, known for dramatic roles, attacks the part with obvious glee, even breaking into a rap assisted by his Muppet henchmen. ("Do you think we're working for the bad guy?" one asks the other.)

In one great throwaway joke, whenever Tex Richman is savoring his evil plans, he doesn't just break out into a maniacal laugh, but actually narrates it: "Maniacal laaauuuuugh!!"

Director James Bobin, a TV veteran, seems to grasp the tone and pitch of the Muppets, combining broad physical humor for kiddies with wry observations aimed at their parents. Though the story does get a big draggy near the middle, and the movie feels a little bit overlong.

Still, "The Muppets" is a joyful and successful reboot of a beloved franchise.

The movie is preceded by a 7-minute "Toy Story" short that finds Buzz Lightyear usurped by a micro-version of himself from a fast-food promotional giveaway. It's moderately amusing, though I savored the wink to Disney's mega-merchandising.

3 stars out of four

Review: "The Company Men"

Something has gone seriously askew in America.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the heads of a company would be ashamed to show their faces if it performed so poorly they were forced to let workers go. CEOs were well paid, but did not earn 700 times his or her average employee. When times were lean, sacrifices were shared around -- as were the fruits when money rolled in.

Now, companies still making a decent profit  lay off 30-year employees to jigger the stock price a little bit higher. The top dogs demand and receive bonuses that could've paid the salaries of hundreds of people let go. Executives decorate their offices in mahogany and Degas paintings, while working stiffs watch as their houses are foreclosed.

"The Company Men" is about the big and the little guys. It's a searing portrait of a corporate culture utterly lacking in human values and the people who are rolled over by it. It's an effective drama, even if writer/director John Wells is occasionally a bit heavy-handed with his us-versus-them shtick.

But in these dark times a lot of people who have lost jobs will see this movie, and recognize those feelings of resentfulness, anger and -- most excruciatingly -- sudden anonymity.

"You know the worst part? The world didn't stop," one canned veteran wails. "My life ended and nobody noticed."

Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck) is a rising star, the regional sales director for GTX, a former shipbuilding company that has diversified into a behemoth. He is 37 years old, makes $160,000 a year, drives a Porsche, has the prototypical mini-mansion in the Boston suburbs and a wife and two kids.

Bobby thought he'd be safe from the latest round of cuts, after having been given the personal assurance of a patron high up in the company. But he gets pink-slipped, and the scene where he carries his belongings to the parking lot, and sees a dozen others holding the same cardboard boxes, is a punch in the gut.

At first, Bobby is in denial about his situation. He thinks he'll have another job lined up long before his severance runs out. He insists on paying exorbitant golf club fees and dry cleaning bills while the mortgage teeters because, as he tells his wife Maggie (Rosemarie DeWitt), "I need to look successful."

But the hiring market is a bleak slog of unreturned phone calls, long waits in waiting rooms, and interviewers who don't even bother to stop eating while they talk to you.

"The Company Men" is sprinkled with a raft of strong supporting performances. Tommy Lee Jones give an Oscar-worthy turn as Gene McClary, who helped built GTX from the ground up but has become disillusioned by its dehumanizing slide. His partner, James Salinger (Craig T. Nelson), insists they're not responsible for employees losing their jobs because the market demands it.

"We work for the stockholders now!" he thunders.

Chris Cooper has an almost feral energy as an upper-level exec who clawed his way up from the factory floor, only to face professional extinction. A job placement consultant coldly advises him to dye his gray hair and omit any mention of his Vietnam military service from his resume.

Maria Bello plays the seemingly heartless human resources chief, who main job seems to be telling people theirs no longer exists.

I especially liked Kevin Costner as Jack, Bobby's brother-in-law. A blue-collar contractor who used to needle Bobby about assisting in the corporate migration of jobs overseas, it's the sort of small, un-showy role that forms the connective tissue of movies like this, and which stars usually take a pass on.

Will people be too depressed this winter to go see a movie that depicts what a soul-crushing affair it is to lose your job? If a solid, worthy film like "The Company Men" fails to get hired by audiences, we're all doomed.

3 stars out of four

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: "Remember Me"

"Remember Me" is a mess of a movie, but its flaws are those of a cast and crew trying to do too much, rather than taking the easy way out with cliches and familiar plot devices.

The romantic drama has a twist ending that feels cheap and exploitative. And some of the actors -- notably Chris Cooper -- get lost in the ambitious but undisciplined storytelling.

Still, I would rather sit through a dozen noble failures like this than the latest idiot comedy or sentimental pap.

Robert Pattinson, in his first role since the "Twilight" movies made him a phenom, plays Tyler Hawkins, the scion of a well-to-do family who's slumming it in the poorer boroughs of New York City. He's seriously estranged from his business magnate father (Pierce Brosnan, proving once again that one of the few things he can't do is a convincing American accent).

He attends college, but not officially, only auditing some classes, and spends most of his time working part time at a book store, or hanging out in a coffee shop writing in a journal that he shows to no one. He's coasting through life, undecided about just about everything.

It's the sort of role that seems designed to promote Pattinson's mojo as a heartthrob rather than build a discernible, believable character. He twitches a lot and clenches his jaw and doesn't look people in the eye, except for the one person in the world he truly cares about, his little sister, Caroline. Tyler is the classic sensitive/broken soul who needs a romance to assemble the disparate pieces of his lackadaisical life.

That would be a role for Ally, played by Emilie de Ravin (an Aussie whose American accent is also strained). She's the daughter of a tough cop (Cooper) and a mother who was gunned down when she was 11. (Mom is played by Martha Plimpton, who I can't even remember the last time I saw her onscreen, and it makes me happy seeing her.)

Ally's dad compensates for his wife's murder by keeping a sharp eye on his daughter. Needless to say, he doesn't much care for the unambitious Tyler or his horndog roommate Aidan (Tate Ellington). In fact, the two meet the cop before Ally, when they try to break up a street fight. Tyler mouths off to him and so he throws them in jail. Aidan spots Ally with her father, and suggests as a joke that Tyler flirt with Ally using his gift with "that freaky poetic crap" that the gals love.

So he does, but then they fall for each other for real. Friction with the two fathers exacerbates their relationship on either end, which is further strained by other family problems for Tyler.

The screenplay by rookie Will Fetters meanders and loses its way, more interested in individual scenes than any kind of narrative arc. Some of its eddies are interesting enough in their own right, while other times we wish the film would hurry up. I kept waiting for things to happen -- such as the two a-hole fathers meeting -- that never did, and some of the places the story did go were baffling and boring.

For instance, there's a whole long sequence about Tyler sister Caroline getting hazed by some school mates at a sleepover party. Kids can be nasty to each other, and I don't want to minimize the effects of bullying. But the way the entire Hawkins clan goes into crisis mode over some pretty mild behavior seemed way overblown. Tyler's super-busy father, who doesn't even bother to acknowledge his son's 22nd birthday, stops everything he's doing to rush over. It just felt contrived and wrong to me.

The title comes from Tyler's brother Michael, who killed himself six years earlier. Tyler has Michael's name tattooed over his heart, and gets all cold and moody whenever anyone brings the subject up. The movie doesn't really do anything with this information other than use it whenever an angsty moment is required.

The Ally/Tyler romance didn't really do anything for me. We believe that they're a couple because the movie tells us so, not because they seem fated to be together. I also didn't like how they treated the character of Ally's father. He's all rage without any paternal warmth. We never spend any time with him, so we don't understand what makes him tick. All we see is him doing bad things, so eventually we just figure he's a bad guy.

(I will say that if I were Tyler, after the same police detective beat me up twice, I'd be thinking about a conversation with his lieutenant.)

Director Allen Coulter is a TV veteran who made the excellent "Holllywoodland" a few years back, and he seems to have a nice touch with actors but not with the mechanics of storytelling. I really liked the performance he got out of Ruby Jerins as little Caroline -- she seemed to hold all the hope and fears of a lonely, gifted child in her every glance.

I won't say anything about the strange, shameful ending, other than the film's timeline should have tipped me off.

It doesn't work, other than as a purely manipulative trick. For some reason, I want to believe the people behind this movie are better than that, so I'll write it off as a profoundly misguided mistake rather than a cynical ploy.

2.5 stars