Month: November 2017

Forgive me if this sounds redundant, but I feel I should advise you right up front that “Dreamgirls” is a musical. The reason I say this is because when the movie ended, I heard several people comment negatively about how there was too much singing. They clearly did not know what they were getting themselves into, and in their defense, the first I had heard of the musical – which, for the record debuted in 1981, ran for over 1,500 performances and won six Tony Awards – was about a month ago. So there it is. It’s a musical. Let’s move on.

You can tell the kind of movie “Draft Day” is going to be by the company it keeps. The NFL and ESPN are on board, which means they approve of the story line, which means said story is safe as kittens. And holy cow, is this movie safe. That it manages to still be entertaining is to its great credit, and nearly all of that is because of Kevin Costner. Imagining this movie with anyone besides him in the lead role is unthinkable.

Talk about having your cake and eating it too. For his debut as a writer and director, Joseph Gordon-Levitt pens a script that gives him the opportunity to grope and “bed” a bevy of gorgeous women (capping it off with Scarlett Johannson), and gets the last laugh by putting a fair amount of depth into his study of a very shallow man. “Don Jon” feels a bit like a comedic version of “Shame,” the infamous wow-look-at-Michael-Fassbender’s-penis movie, but in reality the two leads are alike only in that they’re broken men who like to score. Where “Shame” was more of a character study, “Don Jon” is focused on a societal problem.

The young adult craze (“Twilight,” “The Hunger Games”) has recently crashed (“Beautiful Creatures,” “Vampire Academy,” “The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones”), and the media has decided that the fate of future young adult film adaptations will live and die on the box office returns of “Divergent.” This is patently unfair, of course; “The Hunger Games” sold 14 times as many books as “Vampire Academy,” so why should anyone expect anything less with their film adaptations? Answer: they shouldn’t, but somehow this is now “Divergent’s” problem. The good news is that “Divergent” should fare much better than the three ‘crashed’ movies. It’s intriguing, and asks valid questions about when we can reasonably expect a young adult to know who they truly are, and why we tend to punish people who prefer to think for themselves, but it has some issues as well, namely an absurd amount of exposition, a rigid story structure, and a lack of emotional impact.

“Disturbia” is every bit the “Clueless Rear Window” that you think it is. (That’s clueless as in Amy Heckerling’s awesome 1995 comedy, not clueless as in ‘people in horror movies do the zaniest things.’) And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Simple and direct like the 2005 airplane thriller “Red Eye,” “Disturbia” doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is, and thank goodness for that.

Fellow movie critic Jason Zingale recently joked of suffering indie movie fatigue, in that the indies are beating the snot out of their big-budget cousins…and he’s actually getting tired of it. Are the big boys ever going to hit back? The long-term answer is yes, when Fox releases “Avatar,” but the short-term answer is no, as evidenced by the following of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” with “GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra.” Ugh.

Thank God that “Dinner for Schmucks” is not the soulless, mean-spirited movie that its ads make it out to be. If anything, it’s like “The Cable Guy” crossed with “Dennis the Menace,” if Dennis grew up to be geeky and completely lacking in self-awareness and common sense. Unfortunately, heart or no heart, it’s still not very funny. Outrageous, perhaps, but it’s too full of itself to get emotionally invested in.

Kristen Wiig plays a character on “Saturday Night Live” that can’t keep a secret. Man, could this movie have used her. The story for “The Dilemma” hinges almost entirely on people not talking to each other, running on what our colleague John Paulsen has astutely dubbed manufactured conflict. One simple sentence could clear up this movie in 20 minutes, or even better, open up doors to newer, more realistic, and potentially funnier outcomes. But not this movie: this is the Johnny Tightlips of comedies, and it will bleed to death before it tells anyone where it’s been shot.

Ronny Valentine (Vince Vaughn) and Nick Brannen (Kevin James) run a Chicago auto parts shop that is looking to secure a lucrative deal with General Motors, but Nick, the technical wizard of the bunch, is severely stressed about being able to deliver what they’ve promised. When Ronny is scouting locations to propose to his girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Connelly), he stumbles upon Nick’s wife Geneva (Winona Ryder) in the arms of a tattooed dirtbag (Channing Tatum). He wants to tell Nick what’s going on, but is afraid that doing so will prevent him from delivering on the GM deal, not to mention break his heart. When Ronny presses Geneva to come clean, she uses Ronny’s sordid past as a means to buy his silence. Beth, meanwhile, sees Ronny acting strangely, and suspects he might be gambling again.

Infidelity, addiction, blackmail, betrayal: sounds like a laugh riot, right? To be fair, “The Dilemma” might have worked as a black comedy in the hands of someone like John Dahl – his 1993 movie “Red Rock West” frequently came to mind while watching this, for reasons I can’t divulge – and it even might have worked as the broad comedy it’s supposed to be, had they not muzzled three of the four leads. As it is, Vaughn does approximately 80% of the talking, as if that’s been a good idea in any movie he’s made since “Wedding Crashers” (just try not to wince when he starts tapping his glass with a fork at an anniversary party), and the rest of the jokes are supposed to come from Tatum (he’s a sensitive oxycontin junkie!) and Queen Latifah’s overly enthusiastic GM executive (she talks like a guy, all horny and stuff!). It feels like it was created by a script generator that tried to repackage James Franco’s sympathetic drug dealer from “Pineapple Express” and Jane Lynch’s saleswoman in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” for a PG-13 audience. It doesn’t gel, and it isn’t funny. It also tricks the audience into believing a lie up front for the rest of the movie to work. It’s all just a long con, and an overlong one at that, by a good 25 minutes.

The idea behind “The Dilemma” has potential, but nearly everything about its execution is off. Granted, it’s been over a decade since Ron Howard directed a comedy – and, ahem, two decades since he directed a good one – but you have to think that even he knew this wasn’t working, and no amount of Vaughn’s restless chatter was going to change that. Vaughn, meanwhile, is now six years removed from his last good movie. Time for a come-to-Jesus chat with the agent, Trent.

If I were pitching Lauren Weisberger’s novel “The Devil Wears Prada” around Hollywood, I’d call it, “’The Devil’s Advocate’ of fashion.” For all I know, that’s exactly what they did. That “The Devil’s Advocate” isn’t a great film (though it certainly has its charms) is not the point. The key to the pitch is making the producers feel comfortable, and referencing “Advocate” is something that they can wrap their heads around. “Right, so instead of Al Pacino, we have our eye on Meryl Streep as the Devil. Even the role of the soul-selling innocent will be a doe-eyed brunette. It can’t miss!”

One of the most jaw-dropping things we witnessed at the movies this year took place before the movie started. Attached to “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” was a trailer for a claustrophobic thriller in an elevator. It’s doing a pretty good job of selling itself, and then a title card comes on that says, “From the mind of M. Night Shyamalan.”

The audience burst out laughing. Wow.