Video review: "White House Down"

Big, dumb and fun – that’s the definition of what a good summer popcorn movie should be, and “White House Down” delivers on all counts. This big-budget thriller bombed hard at the box office, but now that it’s hitting video you’ve got the perfect chance to indulge in its schlocky charm.

Jamie Foxx plays President of the United States James Sawyer, in a thinly-veiled riff on our real-life POTUS. And Channing Tatum plays John Cale, a D.C. cop looking to break into the Secret Service. While on a job interview at the White House, it gets invaded by a pack of right-wing paramilitary types.

Cale gets to pose as Bruce Willis in the “Die Hard” movies, the lone do-gooder trapped in a confined space with nihilistic terrorists and a bunch of helpless captives – including his own young daughter (Joey King). Bloody mayhem ensues, and before long the wannabe guardian and the cat-cool president have teamed up to take out the bad guys.

Watching these two trade quips like a buddy-cop duo is both silly and sublime. Because the movie is in on the joke of how goofy it is, we’re invited to laugh along rather than at it.

To call the plot improbable is a compliment. It’s a totally absurd hodgepodge of gunfights and one-liners, culminating in a car chase around the White House grounds with RPGs flying hither and thither.

It may have all the plausibility of a teenager’s video game, but this movie is a total gas.

Video goodies are ample and lightweight, just like the movie. The DVD comes with four making-of featurettes, focusing on the two stars, supporting cast, stunts and director Roland Emmerich – a seasoned hand at flicks like this (“Independence Day”).

Opt for the Blu-ray version and you add a gag reel and nine more featurettes focusing on various aspects of production, including what it’s like to recreate the White House down to the smallest detail – and then blow it all up.

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Review: "White House Down"

I think I’ve put my finger on what this summer’s spate of movies has been sorely lacking: fun.

Everything’s so gosh darn dark. Iron Man’s wrestling with his psyche. Superman’s all angsty. Vin Diesel can’t spare a smirk. Heck, the new “Star Trek” flick put “Darkness” in the title. Even the comedies have seemed more a chore than a lark.

Count on Roland Emmerich, the auteur of disaster/action spectacle, to remind us what summer movies should be all about: goofy, cheeky, action-packed and silly. The man who launched his Hollywood career blowing up the White House in “Independence Day” now merely has terrorists invade it in “White House Down.”

And it’s up to one lone lawman to rescue the likable President, perforate the bad guys, save a cute kid and give an inside-man-turned-traitor his comeuppance -- preferably messily.

If this plot sounds overly familiar, that’s because we saw almost the exact same story in this spring’s “Olympus Has Fallen.” Which, come to think of it, was also one of the year’s most enjoyable cinematic jaunts.

Whereas “Olympus” was grim and tight, “Down” is giddy and loose. Emmerich and screenwriter James Vanderbilt infuse plenty of light moments and outright humor into the proceedings. Leads Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx take these soft pitches and gleefully wallop them over the wall, at times resembling a buddy-comedy duo.

You might think all the hoots would undermine the action sequences. But in acknowledging its own preposterousness, the movie invites us to laugh along with, rather than at, all the loopy plot points.

I’m not saying this is a dumb movie. But it is the sort that asks you to lower your suspension-of-disbelief shields and just go with it. For me, this happened right around the moment Tatum and Foxx were screaming around the White House grounds in the presidential limousine, terrorists chasing them in Hummers outfitted with machine guns, with more bad guys firing RPGs at them from the roof.

Absurd? Over-the-top? Fun as all get-out? Yes to all.

The set-up is that President James M. Sawyer (Foxx) is pushing a Mideast peace plan, and a lot of people are nervous. So when a bunch of mercenaries invade the White House, it seems much more motivated by vengeance than the $400 million in cash they’re demanding.

John Cale (Tatum) is an Army veteran and D.C. police sergeant who’s got a mind to join the Secret Service – mostly to impress his precocious tween daughter, Emily. He takes her to the White House for a tour while he has a job interview – which turns out to be with an old college flame (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who lets him down easy.

Emily is played by Joey King, whose mix of smarts, screen presence and moxie virtually guarantee greats things ahead. In one moment of extreme duress, Emily growls at a gunman, “Get away from me” – quite possibly the gutsiest character moment in the movie.

Michael Murphy plays the vice president, who’s a little overeager to take on the POTUS mantle, while Richard Jenkins is the humbler Speaker of the House, next in line. Jason Stenz is effective as the paramilitary leader, Jimmi Simpson has fun with the over-caffeinated computer hacker role, and Kevin Rankin is memorable as a loathsome skinhead baddie.

I also liked Nicolas Wright as the comic relief, an enthusiastic White House tour guide, and Lane Reddick as the by-the-book military man. James Woods shines as the grizzled Secret Service chief closing out his last week on the job.

If “Olympus Has Fallen” had a distinctive right-wing flavor, it’s hard to ignore an obvious but unobtrusive liberal tilt in “White House Down.” Foxx’s Sawyer is a thinly-veiled Obama substitute, a young academic with a cooler-than-thou attitude, flashy wife and Nicorette gum habit.

At one point Sawyer dons his favorite sneakers during their flight, and when one of the villains grabs his leg the president forcefully delivers a kick and a quip: “Get. Your. Hands. Off. My. Jordans!!”

Say what you will about Emmerich, but the man knows how to do popcorn movies right.

All I know is we’re almost at the year’s halfway point, and if you asked me to name my Top 10 List right now, it would include two ludicrous movies about the White House getting taken over. Hey, fun’s fun.

Video review: "Hysteria"

"Hysteria" had me until about two-thirds of the way through. This witty, funny movie is a highly fictionalized but not entirely ludicrous account of the invention of the vibrator, circa 1880 London. Yes, that's right, the world's most popular sex toy was created by starchy doctors seeking a way to address upper-crust housewives reporting vague physical and emotional problems.

Up until the 1950s, "hysteria" was the catch-all diagnosis that medical men gave to an umbrella of symptoms displayed by women that they didn't understand: frigidity, depression, etc. Going back to antiquity, the prescribed remedy was vulval massage performed by a medical professional. In other words, women would go into a doctor's office to be manually stimulated by the hand of a doctor until they achieved ... remedy.

Director Tanya Wexler and screenwriters Stephen Dyer and Jonah Lisa Dyer take a tongue-in-cheek approach to the material, concocting a story of an ambitious young doctor, Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy), who took out the first patent on a vibrator.

Apprenticed to a wealthy physician who treats the vexations of London's finest females (Jonathan Pryce), Granville woos his mentor's proper daughter (Felicity Jones) but is intrigued by her sister, the brash, idealistic proto-suffragette Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal).

At first, the dashing young doctor is a boon to the practice. But he soon finds himself plagued by hand cramps, and has to come up with a mechanical alternative with the help of his friend and rich patron, Edmund St. John-Smythe (Rupert Everett).

It's all played for jokes and winks, to generally successful effect. I should point out that despite the film's R rating, all the "treatment" takes place under modest drapes appropriate to the Victorian era, and beyond the risqué subject matter the movie is unlikely to shock even the most matronly of grandmothers.

The last half-hour or so gets a bit forced, as the filmmakers find ways to nudge Charlotte and Granville together in ways that aren't entirely convincing. Charlotte's over-the-top progressive attitudes also become grating, seemingly stitched on to the story to benefit the sensibilities of the modern audience, rather than any temporal believability of the characters.

Video extras, which are the same for both Blu-ray and DVD editions, are substantial but not terribly expansive.

Director Wexler teams up with Dancy and Pryce for a feature-length commentary track. I like it when actors participate in commentary tracks, but it's a shame Gyllenhaal chose not to contribute. Similarly, the featurette "An Evening with Tanya Wexler, Hugh Dancy and Jonathan Pryce" exasperatingly excludes the female lead.

There are also a handful of deleted scenes, a making-of featurette, and "Passion & Power: The Technology of Orgasm," a 43-minute documentary on the history of power-assisted sexuality.

Movie: 2.5 stars out of four
Extras: 3 stars

Review: "Nanny McPhee Returns"

Just a few weeks ago I was reviewing "Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore" and lamenting that movies made for the very youngest children always seem to aim so low. It's almost as if because the intended audience is small, filmmakers feel like their ambitions must likewise be puny.

And then along comes another sequel, "Nanny McPhee Returns," to demonstrate how family films can actually be enjoyable for the entire family.

In case you didn't catch the first movie from five years ago, Emma Thompson wrote both screenplays (based on a series of books by Christianna Brand) and stars as the stern and horrendously ugly titular character. Always sent to the worst families in England, Nanny McPhee goes where she is needed but not wanted, but as soon as she is wanted but not needed, off she goes again.

McPhee is part Mary Poppins, in that her nanny skills are augmented by supernatural powers, but no spoonfuls of sugar to be found here. She doesn't sing either, preferring a stern look and a grunt to get her point across.

If things really get out of hand, she bangs her magic walking stick on the ground, and higgledy-piggledy ensues, usually followed by life lessons. (The film was originally titled "Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang," which is much better.)

The first film took place sometime in the 1800s, and for the sequel the action has moved up to World War II. Young mother Isabel Green (Maggie Gyllenhaal, doing a snappy British lilt) is up to her neck running her husband's farm while he's off fighting in the war, looking after their three children, Vincent, Norman and Megsie (Oscar Steer, Asa Butterfield and Lil Woods).

Things go from chaotic to unmanageable when Isabel's rich niece and nephew, Cyril and Celia, come to stay (played by Eros Vlahos and Rosie Taylor-Ritson). "We're in the land of poo," Cyril observes from their limousine upon surveying the Green farm. Things between the cousins grow worse from there.

Nanny McPhee soon arrives -- ostensibly dispatched by the Army -- to take charge of the situation.

There's a lot of charming antics going on. The prize piglets escape from their pen and must be rounded up, but not before engaging in a little synchronized swimming. Isabel's scheming brother-in-law (Rhys Ifans) is out to sell the farm, because he's got a pair of hitwomen (you read that right) after him for gambling debts.

Maggie Smith shows up as Isabel's forgetful employer, who has a tendency to sit in cow patties and fill up filing cabinets with syrup. And I got a kick out of the helpful manual published by the War Department, "Defusing Your Bomb: Three Simple Steps to an Explosion-Free Day."

The gag is that Nanny McPhee's warts, snaggletooth and other gruesome features disappear as the children learn to behave. There's even a suggestion that she's been at this for some time (watch for Maggie Smith to flash a familiar token).

This film is rated PG, though I cannot conceive of it offending anyone, unless you consider a burping bird to be risqué material.

"Nanny McPhee Returns" may not be the most original material, but director Susanna White pitches the tone just perfectly, a combination of fairy and morality tales. Compared to so much of the dim-bulb rubbish churned out for tots, it practically qualifies as enchanted.

3 stars out of four

Review: "Crazy Heart"

Not long ago I was watching an old Jeff Bridges movie (1972's "Fat City") and blogged that he "is quietly having one of the great film acting careers."

And this was before I saw "Crazy Heart," perhaps the finest performance of that 50-year run.

Never winning, Bridges has been nominated four times for an Oscar -- for "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot," "The Last Picture Show," "The Contender" and "Starman" -- and should have been nominated at least four other times -- "The Fisher King," "Tucker: The Man and His Dream," "Seabiscuit" and "The Fabulous Baker Boys." (Probably "Fearless," too.)

"Crazy Heart" will earn Bridges number five, and perhaps the elusive golden statuette.

He plays Bad Blake, a once-famous country singer who has reached the bottom of the barrel, and just kept burrowing downward. As we first meet him, he arrives to play a gig at a bowling alley, pouring out a jug of urine from the long drive in his battered '78 Suburban: Bad is literally pissing his life away.

He's 57, with a Dunlop belly spilling over his Texas-sized belt buckle, a scraggly beard and a face creased like aged leather. He smokes persistently, drinks whiskey prodigiously, and sings mournful songs about regret and loss to the few diehard fans who care to show up.

"I used to be somebody, but now I'm somebody else," goes one of his typical lyrics. A crowd favorite is, "It's funny how falling feels like flying ... for a little while."

Bridges embodies these songs (by Stephen Bruton and T-Bone Burnett) the way he does the role itself: With an easy, vanity-free grace that never feels like it's trying to impress for its own sake.

Bad is a man with no illusions about his has-been status, motoring from one tiny Southwestern town to another, taking any gig he can get, happily obliging any female fan who wants a roll in the sack with a once-legend -- even if the groupies are rougher-looking than they used to be.

In Santa Fe, he's surprised to find a good piano player to back him, and even more surprised by the pianist's niece, a newspaper reporter who wants an interview. Played by Maggie Gyllenhaal -- in a full-bodied turn worthy of its own nod come Oscar time -- Jean is a single mom with a 4-year-old, who's had a run of bad luck with men.

She convinces herself, against her better judgment, to green-light Bad's syrupy, well-worn come-on ("I wanna talk about how bad you make this room look") and eventually enter a relationship with a man whose notion of commitment is measured in the distance to his next town and the price of his next bottle of rattlesnake hooch.

"Crazy Heart" was directed by first-timer Scott Cooper, who also penned the screenplay from the novel by Thomas Cobb. I loved the authentic little details with which Cooper infuses his film -- like Bad, who treats his own body like a cesspool, polishing his guitar with reverence.

The supporting performances are similarly tidy, with Robert Duvall (also a producer on the film) as Bad's lone friend/bartender, and Colin Farrell as Tommy Sweet, a former protégé whose star has greatly eclipsed that of his mentor, much to both men's dismay.

But there's no mistaking who the frontman is of this ballad, so sad and so true. Jeff Bridges' masterful portrayal of a man who used to be somebody is pitch-perfect.

3.5 stars