Adam Beach sofa bombs Phoenix press

At the Ritz Carlton in Phoenix today to interview Leah Gibson, co-star of Rogue, the new crime serial on DirecTV. Out of nowhere, Adam Beach, Gibson's boyfriend, turned up to chill out for a bit. (He only vaguely remembered that I interviewed him in 2006 for Flags of Our Fathers.) It was all very strange. 

Generation Me heads to "spring break forever"

Spring Breakers is a singular object lesson on the concept of “more.” More volume. More stimulus. More energy. More, more, more.

I was reminded of Justin Torres' note-perfect first chapter to We the Animals: "We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men."

If you recall, "more" was also the theme of Scarface, Brian de Palma’s influential kingpin story about Tony Montana, who wanted the world and self destructed on the brink. It’s completely appropriate then that a character in Spring Breakers has “Scarface on repeat” in his bedroom. This is Scarface with college girls and it’s relentless.

It stars four bikini-clad princesses of varying degrees of innocence, from the fawn-like Christian girl to the coked-out nihilist. They arrive to Florida’s spring break parties like the Four Horse(wo)men of the Apocalypse; their steeds are candy-colored scooters. Beneath them the ground quakes, but only from the pulsing music that throbs from the DJ booth. If this is the apocalypse, then it is painted in neon and glitter and its soundtrack is dubstep and Britney Spears.

Much has been made about Spring Breakers up to this point. It stars some squeaky-clean child stars who aren’t so squeaky or child-like anymore. They spend much of the movie in tiny bikinis, and much of it doing very bad things with guns, drugs and criminals. Many people had written the film off simply because of its elementary subject matter — teens at spring break. To many, me included, it looked like a stylized version of an MTV reality show. But it is a serious film with some momentous ideas, and it’s written and directed by a very serious director, Harmony Korine (Gummo), who has something to say about Generation Me and their quest for more. His Spring Breakers, a hand grenade tossed from the screen, is an intensely provocative movie that will surely become a cult classic, a label it earns in spades.

Four college girls are out of money and can’t afford the bus tickets to Florida for spring break. So they do something that comes only naturally to them: they rob a fried-chicken joint using sledgehammers and squirt guns. Cash in hand, the girls — Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson) and Cotty (Rachel Korine) — explode onto the spring break scene, which largely involves men pouring alcohol onto topless women in slow motion. The movie frames its subjects lovingly and, yes, a tad gratuitously as shots linger on breasts, groins and mouths. It’s shot through a distorted lens of hyper-stylization with over-saturated colors, bleached horizons, washed-out vistas and a campy VHS quality. The look is intoxicating and hypnotic, a vortex of color that envelopes you in a dizzying flood of quick cuts and slow motion.

The girls are barely individuals; they operate more as a pack than as four single minds. The only standout is Faith, the wholesome all-American girl with the questionable friends. We meet Faith first, framed in a beautiful shot of floor-to-ceiling stained glass. Her preacher is warning her: “The swagger is coming on upon us.” He looks like a TV wrestler with his dyed hair and fake tan. When Faith tells her church friends she’s going to Florida for spring break, they tell her to “pray hardcore.” Another girl adds: “No, pray super hardcore.”

Faith isn’t in on the robbery, but she knows where the money came from and goes to Florida anyway. She’s easily, though not entirely, corruptible. When they get to Florida, the party commences at a full throttle. At one point the girls are chugging from tall bottles of hard liquor and singing Britney Spears songs in a parking lot. (Britney’s music makes another appearance later in a scene so surreal and absurd it could easily be a modern-pop version of a Dalí painting.) The next day the girls are arrested for a variety of misdemeanors and then promptly bailed out by Alien (James Franco), a cornrow-wearing hustler who can spot easy prey when he sees it. Later it is abundantly clear, though, that maybe Alien’s the prey as Brit and Candy, the movie’s alpha predators, lock onto his world and refuse to let go until they get more, more, more.

The movie is expertly paced, beautifully shot and choreographed, and the music, switching from party anthems to a more ambient score, is finely tuned to the pace of the action. I really enjoyed a hallucination sequence that played tricks with the film’s digital noise; what looked like film grain was actually a warping effect that morphed the stars’ faces as if their very DNA seemed to spring to life in new directions. Technically, this is a stellar movie in every way, but Spring Breakers is more than just its technical composition. It is a biting exposé on young people and the way they behave. It’s a devastating portrait, one that teens will misunderstand as the director’s explicit acceptance of the YOLO era. The ones who idolize the lifestyle in Spring Breakers will have, unfortunately, missed the point entirely, like all those rappers who worship Scarface, yet forget that Tony Montana dies a miserable wretch at the end.

Korine is certainly an interesting director for this material. In the past he has gazed oddly and humanely at broken souls, and he does it again here. The way he stages the college kids and their spring break “scene” is humane, but still unflattering. He portrays the girls as ditzy idealists whose pathetic needs are fueled by boredom and booze. They want to escape college in Florida so they can “be who they want to be,” to escape from society’s molds. The girls do escape the trappings of a “normal” lifestyle, but they escape to the same place as thousands of other people exactly like them. I’m reminded of a cartoon strip of three pierced and mohawk’d droogs, visual clones of one another, as they point to a man in a suit and tie yelling the word “Conformist.”

It all feels very selfish. Everything that happens in the film is done for selfish reasons. The girls are there to drink and do drugs, substances that alter their self worth. The boys are there to do the same, and have sex, their own narcissistic super move. The hustlers are there for money and power. Even Alien, who bills himself as the Pied Piper of Spring Break, is only looking out for his bottom line and his own vanity. It’s all a power play for each person’s individual needs. No one does anything for anyone else without some kind of personal payoff. After one of the girls gets shot, Brit and Candy go after the shooter more for selfish reasons than revenge. I think Korine is saying something profound about young people and their attitudes, but I also think he loves these characters, as shallow as they are.

The performances are admirable, though I often could not tell which of the four girls I was looking at. Only Gomez and her innocent features were distinguishable among the four leads. Franco’s bizarre Alien will surely be a fan favorite with his platinum teeth-covered grills, his pompous braggadocio and a scene of sexual submission so uncomfortable that several people in my screening walked out in disgust.

This is a remarkable — at times, offensive, crude and profane — film that says something brave and unflattering about young adults and teens. It’s certainly the wildest thing released this year by a mile. And as depraved as the behavior is, you'll be left pondering — or possibly wanting — more, more, more. 

Go for the creatures, ignore the cavemen

The Croods is a breathlessly imaginative caveman story that needs less caveman and more of everything else. I’ve always championed fewer talking-animal movies in theaters, but here’s one where that formula might have offered an improvement.

The Cro-Magnon humans, our primordial ancestors, who star in this DreamWorks Animation movie are just so very odd — their shapes, their voices, their hair, their endless chatter — although I did like how the grandma cavewoman wore a little muumuu made out of lizard skin, and how her son-in-law was constantly plotting her demise to saber-toothed bunnies. Yes, apparently the joke about the mother-in-law is a million years old.

The Croods takes place a million or so years ago, in the cradle of civilization, where bipedaling humans are mingling with the owners of all those bones in our museums, as well as some creatures that never made it to museums, including our friend the saber-toothed bunny, ancestor to Arizona’s famous jackalope perhaps.

In the opening credits, a variety of cave families are rendered extinct by the local bestiary and fauna. In response to all the natural selection around them, pre-nuclear family the Croods decide to live life in absolute terror in a dusty cave. Their motto is simply “fear everything.” Crood patriarch Grug (Nicolas Cage), a well-meaning but fear-mongering father, lets his family out every day for some exercise, some dinner and then it’s back in the cave to fear another day. This routine does not go over so well with the rest of the family, including daughter Eep (Emma Stone), who only wishes to explore the dinosaur-infested landscape — a Jurassic park, if you will — and to live life free of boundaries.

Eventually, their cave is destroyed and the Croods — Grug and wife Ugga, daughter Eep, son Thunk and grandma Maw Maw — are sent scampering into the great unknown with a shirtless Patrick Swayze look-alike named Guy, who has somehow figured out that the continents must be shifting and the only way to survive the exploding lava is to migrate to an area that will eventually become Bermuda. So, Croods in tow, Guy, with a belt made of living sloth, heads out to find something they have abstractly named “tomorrow.”

Their journey is gorgeously colored, with buckets of paint drenching the screen in dripping gobs of color. It looks like candy, deliciously mixed up and thrown together for a film that’s begging us to get a cavity. For the love of Darwin, don’t see this movie in 3-D, a gimmick that will only dim the picture and those glorious hues. As wondrous as the colors are, the creature design is even better, with a large cast of inventive animals that are far, far, far removed from Origin of the Species and paleontology textbooks. Each new prehistoric creature is a marvel for the film’s inspired animation: mouse elephants, turtle-shelled birds, kitten bears, whale cows, alligator ostriches, flower-headed frogs, skunk badgers named Douglas, giant swamp llamas, piranha parrots, feathery cats, conjoined tree squirrels and our saber-toothed bunny, if not the star of the movie then this review. Even the little belted sloth was a magical little creation; the children in the audience howled when he unbuckled his three-toed feet and mimed dialogue.

All of this wonder and awe does not carry over to the Croods, who are forgettably animated and poorly voiced. Cage is simply the wrong choice for voice work: his nasally stammer doesn’t suit the barrel-chested caveman that is Ugg. Never at any point did I stop seeing Cage pantomiming behind a studio microphone and start hearing Grug; the voice simply didn’t match the character, and Grug’s omnipresent chattering over everyone else’s lines doesn’t help. Emma Stone as Eep is better, as is the great Cloris Leachman (this year’s Betty White) playing the grandma.

But then there’s the issue of Eep’s body design, which is just bizarre. She’s supposed to be a teen, but she’s very booby, with big, thick arms and legs, but dainty little hands and feet. It’s all very strange looking. Her hair is a George Washington-like mushroom of frizz that seems to be stuck in place. Pixar movies reinvent digital hair with each new picture — Sully’s fur in Monster’s Inc., or Merida’s red locks in Brave — yet here is a hairdo made of granite with no physics to its movement or bounce. Adding insult to injury, at one point Eep is given what are essentially a pair of prehistoric Ugg boots, proving that no one in a billion years has ever looked good in a pair.

It’s unlikely your children will care about all this, but they aren’t going to drive themselves to the theater, which means you’re watching this, too, and I think you’re going to be struck by how bizarre Eep looks and Grug sounds. All that being said, though, there are some interesting character moments in The Croods. I did like the hand motif that turns up over and over again. Hand prints are lining cave walls, hands stretch upward to touch the last beam of setting sunlight, and hands are used to show that metaphorical reach we all make for our own tomorrows. It’s a symbolic visual theme that is carried throughout the film, and it’s a nice touch — pun certainly intended. One scene, involving pet Douglas, has a twist so macabre and unexpected that only the adults will appreciate its simple setup and brutal payoff.

Other scenes don't ring with so much detail or humor. There's an opening bit with the Croods stealing a creature's egg. I couldn't help but think the egg-stealing, nest-defiling cave-family would be villains in a slightly different version of the same scene. Anyway, so off they go to steal the egg and they all treat it like a big football game, with even poor granny hurdling over animals and tossing the big yolky breakfast around as each and every character is reduced to an action trope, even a baby, whose only role in the film is to be turned loose on unsuspecting victims of the Croods' crudeness. When they aren't killing bird fetuses, the Croods are usually toting poor Guy around as he's wedged in a hollow log because they've decided he's some sort of threat. I don't think the makers of the film knew how to frame the family. They are either too stupid for their own good, or just time fillers for the spreading continents. Even Eep, a character another movie would cast as the intelligent heroine, is often reduced to a mindless proxy for her overbearing father who fears everything. She has no sparkle, no wit and certainly not enough curiosity to justify her close-mindedness to Guy's oncoming adventure. She's simply not written as a strong, independent female, no matter what that leopard-printed micro-mini says.

I’m very curious how American parents will explain the The Croods' time period and setting to their children: they’ll slant it toward science or toward religion. Either the film takes place a million years ago, in a utopia of unmitigated natural selection and Darwinism; or 4,000 years ago, in a post-Eden, pre-Flood land populated by a variety of creatures who will eventually miss the memo about lining up for Noah’s Ark. DreamWorks Animation deserves some commendation for staging a movie in a time period that might make children ask their parents for historical clarification. We need children asking those questions. After all, this is a country that still can’t agree on climate change, evolution and the age of Earth and here’s a movie that ponders all three inside the colorful guts of a plucky CGI version of The Flintstones.

It’s not the best animated movie you’ll see this year, but The Croods will certainly make you smile as its rainbow of color sparkles from the screen. And then you can explain to your kids how science is for schools, religion is for churches and saber-toothed bunnies are for movie theaters.

 

 

Wonderstone: The not-so-magic magic movie

One of the characters in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone calls the charade he's witnessing "rote and mechanical." That's some magic right there: the movie guessed my review before I had even left the theater.

I'm developing a theory that comedy actors should only be allowed to appear in a set number of comedies — three perhaps — before they retire their shticky characters and move onto other kinds of films, or gardening, or scrapbooking, or collecting recycled cans from public park trash cans. Certainly this would have spared us from some of the worst films of Vince Vaughn, Sandra Bullock, Ben Stiller, Will Farrell, Owen Wilson and, yes, Steve Carell, who plays Burt Wonderstone, a magician stuck in a hyper-’80s vortex of Vegas nostalgia.

Carell is the weakest link in this very weak comedy, in which Wonderstone — horrendously draped in the wallpaper from Siegfried & Roy's guest bathroom — is dumped from his cushy Las Vegas theater because his routines are as dated as that bubbling seafood lasagna from that questionable $4.99 buffet in that dark corner behind the penny slots. I can appreciate Carell's zany humor when it's laser-focused, or just sad and lonely — his Michael Scott from The Office was a mixture of both, which gave him a maddeningly endearing quality that made you want him to fail, but then made you sad that you'd seen that failure when his head hung and eyes drooped. He can be a very sympathetic comedian. Think of that scene of him selling all his action figures in The 40-Year-Old Virgin; I wanted to cry for him. 

Carell's performance here, as a David Copperfield-like big-prop magician, is uneven and increasingly frustrating as he dips in and out of an old-timey accent and shuffling to and fro out of those velvety, sequined outfits that only Liberace could love. The film, like many similar comedies — including anything starring Farrell — casts Carell as a brutish egomaniac and then spends the rest of the film unmaking him into a more humble, level-headed leading man. This character "growth," as false and manipulative as it feels, would work if the true Wonderstone weren't such a glowing jerk. The guy's a sexist, arrogant pig, who gives his one-night-stands (including Britta from Community) digitized consolation photographs, the kind of dopey memento you'd get after riding a roller coaster at a theme park, but only after they sign his sex release form absolving him of any morning-after liability. His absolution at the end never seems to wipe away his true purpose, being a dick.

This goes against the tone the film seems to be setting up at the beginning: Young Burt, bullied and alienated at school, comes home on his birthday to find an unbaked boxed cake and one of those beginner's kits of magic tricks. He works at his misdirection, his patter, his sleight-of-hand and, wouldn't you know it, he's a pretty good magician. Fast forward 30 years and we find Burt Wonderstone and partner Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi) are in Vegas rolling in the dough. The elevator to Burt's suite is so luxurious his dates think it's the actual apartment.

The tables turn when masochistic street magician Steve Grey (Jim Carrey) starts stealing guests from Burt and Anton's shows. Grey's act involves him digging playing cards from open wounds, hammering nails with his forehead, barbecuing his skin off his bones and, literally, drilling his frontal lobe. One character calls it "monkey porn," but it's actually called the even-worse "Brain Rapist," which inspires this unfortunate line from James Gandolfini, playing a casino owner: "Folks, get ready to have your brains raped." Yikes!

Other performers include Alan Arkin, who plays the guy who sold all those magic kits back when Burt was a boy. Another is Olivia Wilde, Burt's sexy stage assistant. These are funny people — and charmingly naive of this film's crudeness — and I was craving to watch them in a better movie. We've always know Arkin was hilarious, but Wilde continues to impress me. She's not nearly as funny as her character in another misguided comedy, Butter, but she's a lot of fun here as a better magician than any of her male counterparts. Poor Buscemi isn't given enough to do, and when he is it's a disastrous scene in Cambodia as his Anton Marvelton gives hungry, thirsty children what they always wanted. Food and clean water? "No, magic kits." Some of these gags, besides not being funny, feel kinda slimy and cruel.

Honestly, I could forgive all of this if the magic were better. I'm a sucker for a good magic trick, or just magic in the movies. The Prestige, Christopher Nolan's obsessive examination at two dueling magicians, is one of my favorite films of all time. I love watching all the nuts and bolts of a trick, trying to figure out how a magician misdirects our eyes, and I find that last reveal (yes, the prestige) to be exhilarating. The magic here is stale and dated, no better than the magic in that box of gags for children at the beginning of the movie. Ring tricks, disappearing rubber balls, pulling quarters from ears … this material wouldn't cut it at a 10-year-old's birthday, so forget Vegas. In the big finale, Wonderstone ditches magic altogether and resorts to a thousand or so felony charges by drugging, kidnapping and assaulting his audience. When the judge slams that gavel down on the last day of sentencing, I hope he says, "Abracadabra."

Many years ago, I was at a local prison to watch street magician David Blaine perform magic tricks for some prisoners and their visiting children. Blaine was sitting on a picnic bench, children and prisoners in orange jumpsuits crowding all around him. It was a surreal image. All he had was a deck of cards, but his magic was inventive and incredible. I was standing right there, but I couldn't see how he was doing it. It was fascinating. Blaine's recent endurance feats, and those of shock-artist Criss Angel, are the butt of many jokes in Wonderstone, but a good magic trick, one that feels like real magic, is a hard thing to replicate. And never at any point does The Incredible Burt Wonderstone get it; not as a movie about magic and definitely not as a comedy.

You know that trick, where a magician pulls a rabbit out of his hat? Well, this movie does something even stranger: it takes off its hat and pulls out a turkey.

Oops.

My wife during Oz: "Witches be bitches"

What you might not remember about the original Wizard of Oz is that the great Wizard was a weasel. He tells Dorothy: “Kill a woman, steal her broom and bring it back to me; I’ll give you whatever you want.” And then, when Dorothy delivers, he ditches her in his hot-air balloon. Oz is kind of an asshole.

He hasn’t changed much when we rejoin him in the prequel Oz the Great and Powerful, a title desperately in need of a new title or a perhaps just a comma. Oz is a lecherous little cretin, also a horn dog who charms the ruby knickers off anything with a pulse. After he’s whisked to Oz on a black-and-white twister, he saves the day — and, later, rules Oz — using deception and trickery. He does it for gold and power, and to become a God figure, whose booming voice commands worship from the subjects of his magical kingdom. He begins the film as a con artist in a trailer and ends it as a con artist in a castle. He’s barely heroic, yet here he is the star of his own movie, one that frames him as an infallible hero, though he’s easily one of the most flawed anti-heroes in Disney’s vast repertory. Even Jack Sparrow, cutthroat and pirate, had more humanity … and also charisma.

Such is often the case with prequels: they answer questions no one was asking, and add back story to characters that are best left vague and mysterious. And in many cases, the prequel stories only invalidate the original films. Certainly Darth Vader lost some of his edge after George Lucas neutered him with prequels, and here Oz is made to look even more foolish and petty than he ever did 74 years ago in the timeless children’s classic. I’ve been known to howl with disgust at sequels, but I’ll take them all over a prequel any day.

All that said, there is some magic in Oz the Great and Powerful, a sparkly and colorful new creation within L. Frank Baum’s fantasy world. Oz has seen some visual duds before (Tin Man, Return to Oz), but this one is pulsing with organic energy as river fairies whistle tunes, pink butterflies adorn leafless trees and Munchkins — yes, Munchkins are back — do little dances on yellow-brick roads. I could pick apart the hero all day, but the movie meets the high visual expectations we put on stories set in the Oz universe. Some of the panoramic scenes are sorta breathtaking, and I love that image of Oz exiting a forest, the leaves and branches framing the Emerald City; it mirrors a similar scene in the original film.

After a delightful vaudeville act that serves as the opening credits, Sam Raimi’s film begins, wisely, in a square black-and-white picture framed within the movie screen. It opens on a circus, where sideshow magician Oscar “Oz” Diggs (James Franco) is staging sleight-of-hand tricks on dumbstruck Kansas farmers. Notice how some of the early effects in the film — a fire breather’s flames, falling snowflakes, a fluttering dove — breach the side of the picture, hinting at the Technicolor transformation that’s to come.

Once Oz is in Oz, he finds himself embroiled in a witches’ feud, with gothic sisters Evanora (Rachel Weisz) and Theodora (Mila Kunis) waging war with the bubbly Glinda (Michelle Williams) over the fate of Oz, the kingdom, and the heart of Oz, the man. The witches are good sports, especially Williams, even as they trounce on the legacy of the 1939 film. For instance, did you know the Wicked Witch was so wretched because she was one of Oz’s jilted lovers? Yeah, neither did I. The next thing they’ll tell us is that Dorothy is Oz’s daughter, abandoned with Auntie Em after her magician dad skipped town. That could be the prequel’s sequel.

I've already mentioned Star Wars once, but this movie bears many resemblances to it: Evanora, the Palpatine figure, conducts electricity through her fingertips; Theodora, the bratty non-believer with the bruised ego, is turned evil and ugly in an Anakin-to-Vader sorta way; Theodora's broken heart also mirrors Anakin's petty infatuation with his absent lover; and Glinda, the Yoda stand-in, has a Jedi-Sith fight in the Emerald City's throne room. (It was at this point that my wife turned to me and whispered, loud enough for others to hear, "Witches be bitches.") It's as if the prequel genre itself can't escape the worst manifestation of prequels, Star Wars Episode 1-3.

The film is full of colorful locations and wild characters including a talking and flying monkey in a bellhop outfit, haunted forests with carnivorous orchids, a very emeraldy Emerald City and a Chinatown, a village made entirely out of fancy dishware. Chinatown’s last inhabitant is a sweet little ceramic citizen orphaned in the witch war. Oz uses his “magic” superglue to restore her broken legs so she can join in his quest to bring peace to the land. The little China Girl will be everyone’s favorite character. She was mine.

All the CGI and green-screen effects are nifty, but they give Oz a clinical and sterile feel. Everything looks too clean and too perfect, as if the film were created in a lab, a computer lab. None of it feels lived in or inhabited. Parts of it, including Oz bouncing down a rocky waterfall, look more like a video game than a movie. In other parts, the only real things we’re watching are Franco, Kunis and presumably the ground under their feet. Everything else is green-screened in later during post-production. Try they do, but few actors can convincingly look at make-believe CGI effects with any conviction. They call it “movie magic,” but I can see right through the illusion.

My real gripe, though, is with Franco and his Oz. I’ve already told you that Oz is poorly written and realized, but it bears repeating. He’s a pimp, a pusher, a bully, and the fact that he has his own movie would be strangely unsettling for Dorothy, his ultimate victim. As for Franco, he winks and smirks his way through Oz and his attitude never seems to match the tone of the rest of the movie. It’s as if they hired James Franco to play James Franco. A comparative performance would be Franco’s meta-hosting of the Oscars, where he stood around and played the grinning fool everyone knew he was. What’s so odd is that this isn’t Franco’s first prequel; he did Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011. In that film, his acting matched the dialogue and it benefited the picture. Here, though, Franco can’t get his footing, and he never seems to try.

Maybe some of my vitriol is nestled in my belief that some films shouldn’t be touched. Certainly The Wizard of Oz is one of those films. (Casablanca and Pulp Fiction are others.) It is a timeless movie that existed in its own time and place, and replicating it, even in prequel fashion, tarnishes some of its sparkle. Oz the Great and Powerful can’t touch what The Wizard of Oz did, and the fact that anyone thought it was possible is just dopey. They put forth a good effort, but it just doesn’t work.

In the end, the road to Oz isn’t just paved with yellow bricks, but also good intentions and terrible follow-through.

(Like with many visually-dazzling movies, I'm going to post more photos than normal.)