Gone Girl and the downward spiral

Gone Girl starts at the beginning and ends where it started. It's construction — and ultimately it's vast manipulation — is circular and dizzying. When it was over I wasn't sure if I wanted take a deep breath and stagger out of the theater, or go for another ride.

Here is a film that knows what it is and where it's going and does not for even a single nanosecond waver from its course. It's complete and fulfilled — cinematic zen. Not a frame of it is out of place. It is a capable picture, one executed with precision and skill by, who else, David Fincher. He's been making movies like this his entire career, and yet this one demonstrates his absolute mastery of the medium of motion pictures.

The film stars two characters on similar trajectories, but in different locations. Picture two satellites circling a planet but on opposite sides of the same orbit: their views are different, but their journey is the same. One of the characters is Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), a washed up Missouri writer with mountains of debt, a dive bar and a wife who might hate his guts. His wife is Amy (Rosamund Pike), and in the opening scenes she turns up missing. Nick seems concerned, but not overwhelmingly so.

As the police launch their investigation, the town first comes to Nick's side to help him search, and grieve, until they realize that he may have killed her. He has no alibi, the crime scene looks staged, evidence has been tampered with, and there are some concerning journal entries, some of them told in flashbacks by Amy herself. There's also the issue of Nick smiling at press conferences, seemingly unconcerned about Amy's whereabouts, and he's hiding secrets that threaten to destroy his wholesome public image. As the case drags on, people in town start staring and sizing him up: "Yeah, he could be a murderer. Definitely," their eyes suggest. A TV news anchor in the style of Nancy Grace, the self-appointed public executioner on daytime television, all but indicts Nick for a murder that still has no body or murder weapon. A downward spiral shifts him out of orbit.

That's the first act of Gone Girl and I don't dare tell you further plot points since the film is built around its tightly packed secrets, and saying any more would be like walking through a minefield wearing Ronald McDonald's sneakers — very dangerous. The cast is large and complicated, and every performance is marvelous, especially Pike, who plays a narrator so unreliable that I was silently wondering if she even existed at all. Her performance is transcendent and terrifying. Affleck, with some of his Batman muscle already showing, holds his own as the knot Nick tied for himself is pulled tighter and tighter.

The rest of the cast is glorious: Neil Patrick Harris plays a scorned ex-lover, Kim Dickens is a whip-smart detective, a grown-up Patrick Fugit is her partner, Tyler Perry plays a high-profile defense attorney, and Carrie Coon, the glue of HBO's Leftovers, is Nick's supportive sister. Coon takes a disposable supporting role and elevates it into the stratosphere. 

Stepping away from the story and cast, though, Gone Girl is an exploration in technical subtlety. The nuts and bolts of the film, often overlooked in movies, are profoundly focused here, so much so that you might not even notice them, which is the way it should be. The cinematography is dark and moody, with lots of saturated colors and shadowy accents, and it perfectly suits the growing tension in Nick Dunne's collapsing world. I loved a scene during a candlelight vigil; lights above Nick's head cast long menacing shadows over his eyes and face. The editing is often slow and simple, yet also astute and nimble when required. The editing is punctuated by the mesmerizing and meditative score, which fades in and out as the film jumps around in time with Amy's deceptive journal entries. Gone Girl doesn't have the editing of a Scorsese film, the music of a Quentin Tarantino, or the cinematography of a David Lean, but even without all the flash it feels competent, balanced and efficient. 

The film comes from the blockbuster novel of the same name by Gillian Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay. I have not read the book, although it's on my reading list, even now that I know how it ends. And speaking of endings, of course this one packs a wallop. I wouldn't expect anything less from the guy who killed Ellen Ripley, murdered Tyler Durden, solved the Zodiac case, saved Facebook and had one of his most popular picture end with a FedEx delivery. Fincher knows how to cap off movies, and he's an expert on guiding characters to their destinies, no matter how pathetic, violent or rewarding they may be.

What's so remarkable about the way Fincher and Flynn tie up Gone Girl is how circular its journey is. It's a film about manipulation and control and deception. While Nick might be a victim in this spiraling whirligig, he's also the perpetrator. And we are his subjects.

Joe Arpoia: the tyrant sheriff

The Joe Show begins with a moment so surreal, it's simply hard to believe: Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio singing — quite badly — Frank Sinatra's "My Way." This is both a sad joke and an ironic truth about Arpaio's iron grip on Arizona's law enforcement. 

Arpaio, who called himself "America's toughest sheriff" so much that it actually came true, is the star of Randy Murray's fascinatingly frank documentary about how Sheriff Joe, a name that has become shorthand for Arizona's wacky politics, is the most hated/loved figure in the Southwest. His fans adore him, and his critics call him a cancerous void. He could care less what he is, as long as a news crew is there to film his reaction.

Murray's film starts by pitching underhanded softballs right over the plate, and Arpaio clobbers them out of the park. Sheriff Joe does his Sinatra song, cooks pasta in his kitchen with his wife, and he shuffles around his downtown office, which has a locked closet lined with DVDs and VHS tapes of all his media appearances, which he hordes in his vault of drywall and fluorescent lighting. The beginning of the film is so non-threatening and mundane that it feels like more Arpaio fluff — part of the neverending Sheriff Joe PR machine. But then the knives come out, and The Joe Show eviscerates this bewildering Arizonan figure. 

In an early scene, Arpaio parades prisoners around in pink underwear and handcuffs — Maricopa County's fetish of choice — as way to drum up press for his new "tent city," a canvas oasis where Arpaio sends low-level offenders for the benefit of the evening news and his own ego. Joe glows in front of the cameras as he bellows and bloviates to a group of time-robbed reporters and the bouquet of foamy microphones they're offering as virgin sacrifice to that evening's soundbite. And yes, that's a handgun-shaped pin on his tie. 

His humiliating treatment of prisoners provides a nice jumping-off point to many of his other political stunts: the foolhardy Obama birth certificate investigation, his harassment of the city of Guadalupe, bogus corruption charges against county officials, the arrest of New Times editors … the list never seems to end. In the film Arpaio often speaks for himself, and is brutally honest about his intentions — there's no such thing as bad press, except no press, or when someone spells Arpaio wrong. His gold-ol'-boy shtick is amended and tweaked by bobbleheaded PR juggernaut Lisa Allen, who seems like a lonely person. Without Joe will she just evaporate into oblivion?

In case it's not clear, I'm not a fan of Sheriff Joe. I worked for a newspaper that was in his sights for many years. When we didn't cover what he wanted, he retaliated by shutting the paper out of public events. Then press reports stopped coming. And then public records requests were ignored. Eventually the paper sued him, and won. He appealed, and we won that, too. For many years after, I would see Arpaio at media events and when he saw the logo on the press badge he would snarl and growl. Literally.

A lot of what Arpaio does is harmless cornball politics. Pink underwear and green bologna make for fun headlines, and for the most part the public just shrugs its shoulders. But The Joe Show doesn't stop there. It pokes and prods deeper into the stuff that makes even Arpaio fans queasy: the violent deaths of inmates at his jails, including Scott Norberg, whose death was covered up amid disappearing evidence; racial profiling of basically anyone that wasn't as pinkish white as Arpaio; his "culture of corruption," from dopey henchmen like Paul Chagolla and Dave Hendershott all the way down to deputies and jail guards; and the failure to investigate more than 400 sex crimes. That last one should have lost him his last election, but even raped teens couldn't stop the Arpaio media blitz. 

The film features interviews from some of the most important figures in the Arpaio story — with lots of Arpaio himself and Allen, who does a wicked Jane Fonda impression — including one supporter who says she's not a racist, but then says that "Mexicans haven't evolved." One of the interview highlights comes from interviewer Larry King, who states plainly, "Villains make good guests because they don't think they're villains." The film presents both cases, pro-Arpaio and anti, but it's hard not to question Arpaio's police work when the film frames the sheriff as a media-hungry fame-monster who will do anything to be on TV. And that's not necessarily a description he would disagree with. Although it skews against Arpaio, Joe Show will have its cheering section as its star casts himself as Arizona's savior from Obama, Mexicans, criminals and "the media."

Sheriff Joe will go down in Arizona history as an antiquated old fart who was tired of kids on his lawn and Mexicans in his grocery store, but his simplistic view of politics, government and police work will be his ultimate legacy. As much as Joe fancies himself a sheriff, a jailer and the county's top cop, he's little more than a movie star with a badge. And The Joe Show is his blockbuster.

The Guest is thriller or dark comedy, or both

The Guest chugs along like you know what's going to happen. It knows you know. And it's still one step ahead of you.

The film — directed by the You're Next up-and-coming duo of director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett — starts as a thriller so basic that it could be shrink-wrapped and sold at a Walmart in the clearance section. An Afghanistan combat veteran shows up at the house of a dead Marine buddy, whose family welcomes him in and lets him stay over, borrow the car and prepare dinner with their sharpened cutlery. But the veteran, David (played with a psychotic gaze by Downton Abbey nobleman Dan Stevens), is not who, or what, he says he is. And then people start dying.

"There's a couple of abrupt tonal shifts …" screenwriter Barrett said during a recent stop through the Valley to promote the film. "One thing we were really trying to play with a lot was the idea of experimenting with character likability, and obviously I'm primarily referring to Dan Stevens' character — you just love him and he's so entertaining. We treat him seriously as a character, and his behavior and his reactions are consistent, and at a certain point, that becomes a darker thing."

Stevens' David, whose thousand-yard-stare requires a gun permit in a handful of states, slowly unravels, though the film has a sinister sense of humor that collects his unspooling psyche into bundles of dark comedy. The film ends in a Halloween maze with David as the haunted attraction's resident ghoul, the monster that stalks the guests. Before that, though, David mops the floor with some brazen cosmo-drinking high school kids, he blackmails the school principal, and obliterates the male competition at a house party when his muscles come in lugging the remaining kegs. David is a murderous madman, but he has his charm, an aspect of the movie that is twistedly delightful, but one that audiences might have a hard time swallowing.

"We did a similar thing with You're Next, where the movie got increasingly comedic as it went along, and climaxed with this kind of absurdist monologue," director Wingard said. "You’re Next was a gradual progression. The Guest was much more of a 90-degree turn … As a viewer, that's the kind of stuff I enjoy and find fun: when a movie pulls the rug out from under you, as long as it's grounded in a reality with characters that make sense."

I would argue that the David character makes little to no sense. He spends much of the movie helping people to only kill them in the last act. His motives are frail and without much justification. And the terrifying thriller he's crafting is yanked from him in a military twist that deflates the The Guest's more robust possibilities. But David somehow still works, if only because Stevens' is so kinetically malevolent that he outshines the material. (Stevens was on the press tour, but sidelined by an illness and unable to speak with the press.)

"[Stevens] just kind of personified what you really want out of a mysterious character like this," Wingard said. "He has to earn the characters' trust to integrate himself into the family's lives. So we wanted an actor that the audience already trusted to begin with. Their association with him is the polite, mild-mannered Matthew Crawley [from Downton Abbey], and so that association is what we're kind of playing with."

Wingard continues: "… Ultimately what we're playing with is creating a character that we want to conflict the audience. We want to throw the notion of a hero or a villain out the door, and all you should be focusing on is 'are you being entertained by this guy?' Dan had all those aspects to him. He's a very intelligent guy, he got the sense of humor of the script, and we already knew he could act." 

It was their first time working with Stevens, although Barrett and Wingard are frequent collaborators. Frequent enough that I ask them if they're sick of each other yet.

"I would say the key to our creative process is that we actually know when to give each other a lot of space," Barret said. "Like when Adam is editing, I stay completely out of the editing room, so that I can then bring objectivity to his first cut. Adam's first cuts tend to be more polished than a lot of people's final cuts … But that's about two months that I just stay out of his way while he works, and generally I'll take advantage of that time by writing. That's one of the good things about our partnership — we're doubly productive. When I'm writing a script, I tend to not show Adam any pages until I have a final draft, and I try to surprise him with the story and characters."

Wingard agrees that the they function well together and apart: "We tend to not really just hang out on a casual basis that much, even though for awhile we lived literally next door to each other. When you're shooting a movie, you're around each other every day, and then you go on these press tours … so it's not like we’re starving to hang out."

To see these two hang out behind the camera, check out The Guest, which opened Wednesday.

"One ticket for Statutory Rape, please."

Even at 50 years old, actor Errol Flynn was known as a ruthless playboy with a ravishing appetite for pretty young things. So when the Captain Blood star makes a phone call to 15-year-old's house, the mother has every right to slam the receiver down and march upstairs to rain holy hell onto her daughter. But this mother is smitten. 

And that's how quick a teenager is allowed to date and sleep with an aging Hollywood star in The Last of Robin Hood. Fame, it seems, goes a long way in smoothing out the wrinkles of social norms, and creased faces. 

Not that this dilemma is all Flynn’s fault. Beverly Aandland (Dakota Fanning) did show up to a Hollywood movie set with a fake birth certificate saying she was 18. And she never mentioned her age, even though Flynn had his suspicions she was young — too young. Later when he finds out how old she is, he doesn't recoil or jump out of the dating pool like a responsible adult, but instead he manipulates Beverly's mother, a rotten piece of work named Florence (Susan Sarandon), who justifies the pimping out of her daughter in the name of her career. "This is how all the young starlets get roles," she says convincing no one but herself.

The Last of Robin Hood is a true story told from the point of view of Beverly, who wasn't raped on her first date with Errol Flynn, though it came very close. When Flynn turns up the next day, he's head over heels for her and charms her into a relationship that lasts until his death two years later from, likely, alcohol and drug abuse. As Beverly begins to learn about Errol, she's just as smitten as her mother, who accompanies the couple everywhere they go to divert unseemly rumors and gossip magazines. Beverly reminds Errol of a "little sprite … a wood nymph," so he calls her Woodsy, which is not a flattering nickname when yelled across rooms at parties. 

Flynn is played by Kevin Kline, an actor who also dated (and married) a much-younger starlet — though Phoebe Cates was very much a legal adult when they began dating. Comparison images reveal physical similarities, although Kline’s version of Flynn is not as dashing as Jude Law’s swashbuckling lothario from The Aviator. Kline does a commendable job, except he’s just not given much to work around. Flynn could command a room and seduce women with ease, but the script writes him as a hollow shell of want and need. The frustration that Flynn was experiencing as his career faded was likely immense, but the The Last of Robin Hood seems more concerned with tacky spectacle — wooden canes to illustrate his deteriorating health, hidden flasks to show his alcohol dependence, and crushing jealousy for men Beverly's own age (including one played by Flynn's real grandson). 

While the film underhandedly acknowledges his last romance, it barely dents the complicated essence of the actor, and botches attempts to ignite curiosity about his career. At one point The Sea Hawk is brought up, but only in passing and as a joke about how awful it was. (I rather liked his pirate movies.) Only perceptive viewers will learn, if they didn't know already, that the title comes from Flynn's starring role in 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood. The only other film references include a set visit to Africa for the The Roots of Heaven, a bungled three sentences on the communist flop Cuban Rebel Girls (starring Beverly), and a tiny scene with Max Casella as a young Stanley Kubrick casting Lolita. Predator of teens or not, the movie doesn't establish Flynn as a Hollywood star other than to have people gawk at him when he walks by.

Fanning, like Kline, seems to struggle with the script, which is as knotty and floatable as her nickname. Dialogue is terribly written, and occasionally terribly acted, and much of the lightweight staging and tempo give the impression of a Lifetime TV movie. I wasn't surprised to see Lifetime Films produced it — it just looks cheap. I will say this for Fanning, she does convey the innocence of and frailty of a 15 year old. Her whisper-thin frame and her childlike voice give credibility to her character's age, even as Fanning pushes closer to 21 years old.

Sarandon, though, is a mess. Her performance is all over the place, except where it needs to be. And her mother character’s motivations too complicated. By the end of the film I wasn’t sure if she really wanted Beverly to succeed, wanted a free ride or was herself in love with Errol Flynn. When Florence tells Beverly's father about Flynn's advances, the dad flips. "Errol Flynn is a walking penis," he shouts. I liked this guy, and I wanted other characters that smart in the film to balance out the stupid ones. 

So, who was Errol Flynn? This movie has no clue other than he dated a teenager, loved her and then died, and that was a sensational story back in 1959. And still is today.

Hey, November Man, it's August!

The November Man is about as clumsy as spy movies get.

The dopiness starts almost immediately, when the lead spy puts on the suit of America's top diplomat and no one knows the difference. There’s even a parade for the diplomat because apparently that's what people in other countries do for American ambassadors — they host wildly attended events with huge receiving lines and lots of waving flags. And then, during the little parade, no one notices that the diplomat is not the diplomat, but in fact a CIA agent with noticeably different physical characteristics. Ok, so let's assume the random folks at the event don't notice, but what's the assassin's excuse? 

Yeesh, this movie goes on like this, every worthless piece of it. The CIA agent's home computer boots to the CIA login page with a massive spinning logo, because that's completely subtle for a spy working in another country. When a call is being traced a nerdy tech guy stands next to the phone prancing, presumably with a full bladder, and doing the "keep him on the line as long as you can" motion and holding, I kid you not, a wi-fi router up to the phone. In the same scene, spy agents arrive to an operation in a caravan of noisy dirtbikes, and then the lead spy makes a V with his fingers, points at his eyes and says, "I want eyes on him." How did the other agents not chuckle at him a little? "Boss, we can hear you fine. Hand signals not necessary."

The film stars Pierce Brosnan, a former James Bond, so really there is no excuse for this behavior. Yes, Brosnan's Bond films had some flagrant spy stupidity — the invisible spy car, outrunning glacier tsunamis with parasails, and bagpipe guns — but the movies were always meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek and silly. But never idiotic. Not like this heap. 

Brosnan plays Devereaux, a retired CIA operative who is re-activated by his former chief, a man who is so secretive that he never bothers to tell anyone that he has brought an old spy into the case he’s working. This causes mayhem later when Devereaux turns up to rescue a female agent and everyone at the CIA is like, "Who’s this guy?" One agent, a young Jon Bon Jovi lookalike, can only manage to say, "Whose car is that she got into?" but his acting is so limited that it sounds more like, "Whose car. Is that she. Got. Into?" Siri has better diction.

Eventually it's obvious that Devereaux is being framed, but I'm not sure that was the villain's plan all along. It’s an accidental framing. In any case, Devereaux tracks down Alice (Olga Kurylenko, a former Bond girl), who has information on a Russian general in line to become president. The general did some bad things in Serbia, where much of the movie takes place and where a flexible hitwoman is sent to dispose of everyone. We know she's flexible because she checks into her hotel room and promptly does the splits on the floor. Because why not? Her splits move is made more hilarious later when she's delayed by a dying man's final grasp for her foot. All that flexibility and she's held up by the weakest trip move on the planet. (It should also be noted that the dying man is a reporter who works for the New York Times, yet he calls his voice recorder a dictaphone just like your grandpa.)

Anyway, The November Man is just cruising along with Devereaux murdering everyone and stumbling into action scenes, until eventually he has to settle an old score with Jon Bon Jovi (Luke Bracey). This is done by Devereaux getting drunk, slipping into Bon Jovi's apartment and holding a gun to his civilian girlfriend's head and then severing her femoral artery to prove a point that agents shouldn't date while on duty. Bon Jovi bandages the wound and, I think, saves her, but I'm not really sure because we never see her again. This poor girl, did she know what she was getting into when her agent sent her November Man.

Women aren't treated well here. They're all held hostage at one point, or appear naked in strip clubs. Late in the movie, Kurylenko has to disguise herself as a hooker (in the shortest miniskirt ever filmed) to get what she wants from the evil general. But the low point of female objectification comes during an interrogation scene involving a creepy old man being questioned by a young female agent. The first thing out of his mouth: "Show me your tits." The audience laughed at this line, not because it was funny, but because it was comically awful. And sorta embarrassing to witness.

I want to like Brosnan, but his performance is all over the place — at times he's a cool spy guy, but it never lasts as he descends into drunken rampages. He's trying to move past his James Bond years, and I don't blame him, but I think he accomplished that already with 2005's wonderful hitman dark-comedy The Matador. And not only is November Man redundant to his anti-Bond plans, but it’s all kinds of bad. 

It's directed by Roger Donaldson, who's made some noteworthy spy movies before, including the Pentagon thriller No Way Out. He's also worked with Brosnan before, in Dante's Peak, a movie that, when mentioning Donaldson-Brosnan pairings, can now be called "the good one."

All vacations must come to an end

The Trip to Italy is a travelogue with Michael Caine, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, but without all the aggravation of, you know, Michael Caine, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Actors, yes; travel guides, no.

In their place are Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, best friends playing themselves in what can only loosely be described as a film. It's more food channel globe-trotting. Think of an Anthony Bourdain reality show, but with Batman impersonations. Yes, Coogan and Brydon are prone to impersonations, including several from the Batman franchise, from which they do muffled Tom Hardys and half a dozen varieties of Michael Caine. The two actors share conversations in other men's voices, and to them it's just natural and fluid. In the middle of their impersonations they dine on glorious Italian feasts, peer out over gorgeous vistas and cozy up in hotel rooms that are likely more expensive for one night than most people’s homes for a month. 

Fine food, impersonations and fancy locations. This is generally the ebb and flow The Trip to Italy, which is a sequel to 2010's The Trip, both of which are culled from episodes of the BBC show, also called The Trip. There is not much plot, other than what is established in the dialogue: Steve misses his son and communicates frequently with him, and Rob has a family back at home that would be dismayed at his vacation activities. Food is eaten, scenes are taken in, hotel beds are crashed into, and then it all starts again the next day as the two men bop through Italy for a newspaper article about food and travel. They are tracing a similar route taken by Frankenstein author Mary Shelley and poet Lord Byron, who are afterthoughts to the pop-culture references.

The scenes of the men chatting are intercut with B-roll of locals walking through their city squares, little European cars rumbling up cobbled
streets, and of line cooks tossing sizzling vegetables and sous chefs plating elaborate appetizers. This could all be very pretentious and boring if not for Steve and Rob's contradictory interests: there they are in the pinnacle of luxury talking about Bane's facemask from the The Dark Knight Rises. Had they gone to an opera one of them would have brought a whoopie cushion along. 

The impersonations, it must be said, are very good. Their Michael Caine voices have been heard before, but they never get old. Not only can they do Caine, but they can do him from a variety of eras — from the Italians Jobs' shouting to the Dark Knight's weepiness. They also do convincing versions of Anthony Hopkins, Woody Allen, Hugh Grant, Roger Moore and Sean Connery, and yes, Pacino and De Niro. Much of the dialogue is disposable banter, though several lines are worth keeping. In one scene, Steve comments about a women, "She has a lovely gait." Rob adds: "It's probably padlocked." At one point they put in Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette so they can croon nostalgia through the Italian countryside. 

If you saw the first Trip, or enjoy the TV series, then you know what you’re walking into. If not, then The Trip to Italy might be a hard sale. Too little happens, and what does happen is repeated from scene to scene. The locations are amazing, and the food will tie your stomach into a big hungry knot, but the film doesn't have much to offer other than Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, both of whom are likable guys, chatting away mindlessly. 

But here's the thing about vacations: no matter how much you like your travel companions — be it Steve Coogan or your own brother or sister — you eventually get sick of looking at them. That's the case with your every family vacation ever, and also with The Trip to Italy.

Murder is cheap in wicked Sin City sequel

"I was born at night, but I wasn't born last night," Josh Brolin's hard-boiled avenger says to the Dame to Kill For, who coos and saunters over to him, her hips swiveling in see-through négligée, her eyes white orbs blinking seductively in the shadows. The noir drips from the screen in puddles. Bring waders. 

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is less a sequel to 2005’s Sin City than it is an appendix of new characters and alternative viewpoints. I spent much of the movie trying to figure out why Marv, Mickey Rourke's bruiser from the first movie, was alive and well and still picking fights in that dive bar where all the strippers leave their clothes on. The answer is, of course, that this is a prequel, though even that's questionable as Bruce Willis, another dead guy from the first movie, turns up as a ghost. 

So really, don't worry about the details, because what you're going into this for is the pulpy crime drama, the stylized violence and the oozing sexuality. It also helps that the movie looks completely bonkers — panels from the graphic novel are snipped from the page and pasted hastily onto the screen using a mixture of rubber cement, grit and blood. Scenes are shot in silhouette, with accents of vivid color, using unrealistic cell-shaded backgrounds, and with dramatically noirish compositions with eviscerating shadows. The visuals are no better than the first movie, but that's OK because the first movie has yet to be topped, even as The Spirit and 300 — both children of Sin City author Frank Miller — have notably tried. 

Like the first Sin City, this one tells several intertwining stories at once. The main character, or the most main character, is Dwight played by Josh Brolin. He's one of James M. Cain's loser-heroes, a Walter Neff with a trenchcoat and a bad attitude. Dwight is skulking through the night when Ava (Eva Green) turns up and baits him, hooks hims and then, gyrating her constantly exposed breasts, reels him in. She inspires all kinds of noir monologue from him, including this gem: "She's late like always and like always she's worth the wait." Green, who slithers across the screen in fleshy curls, chews up the scenery and dialogue like she hasn't eaten since June. 

As Dwight gets wrapped up in Ava's (and Ava's Boob's) dilemma, elsewhere we meet up with Marv (Rourke), who's the protector of Nancy (Jessica Alba), a stripper who never strips, though she does a routine late in the movie that is terrifyingly aggressive even for a shady biker bar. Nancy was in the original film, and she returns here with little to do, even as she attempts to murder Senator Roark (the joyfully vile Powers Boothe), whose reach into Sin City's criminal underworld is vast. Roark also figures prominently in a plotline involving Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a young gun with a sixth sense for gambling. Like Brolin's character, Gordon-Levitt is given lots of Raymond Chandler-inspired dialogue. "Dammit, Johnny, hate yourself when you got the time," says Johnny. 

Film noir is a Hollywood staple, and easy to mock, and Sin City lampoons it more than it honors it. But that’s not a complaint, because noir is limitless, from the high school drama Brick to the outwardly spiraling Memento. The genre has transcended Chinatown and Double Indemnity to include Sin City and all its high-contrast, black-and-white ultra-stylization. That being said, the franchise can feel very gimmicky and there are times when the plots are victims to the film's over-simplification of noir themes. Christopher Meloni has a brief chapter where he's required to play a smitten detective to Ava's femme fatale. At no fault of Meloni or Green, the sequences feel hammy and overplayed, and they reveal limitations to Sin City’s hyper-noir. 

All in all, though, this is a taut sequel with some notable performances — mostly Rourke, Brolin and Green — as well as some memorable minor performances, including ones by Juno Temple, Lady Gaga, Ray Liotta and a hilarious turn by Christopher Lloyd as a skeevy doctor-for-hire. The film is directed again by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, who must have had fun bringing Miller's violent pages to the screen. Rodriguez might just be the king of exploitation, schlock, cult and other varieties of novelty B-movies, and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is further proof he has no interest in directing a "normal" movie. That's fine by me. 

Lastly, I don't normally mention this, but if you can see Sin City in 3D do it. The graphical nature of the film, and the way it jumps out of comic panels, creates an interesting three-dimensional effect that is unique to this film. And it features the first pair of characters that are entirely designed for 3D — Ava's Boobs. Decide for yourself if that's a good or a bad thing.

 

 

 

Beth is DOA in this zombie stinker

I've heard of dark comedies, but here's a dim one. 

It begins as a weepy death drama about a boy coping with the sudden demise of his girlfriend, then turns into zombie romance and eventually ends as a post-apocalyptic nightmarish comedy. And at no point does it elevate above dismal. 

Life After Beth is a collection of wasted talent, vapid gags and awful dialogue. It doesn't pass the Siskel Test, which asks if the film is more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch. Not only would a movie of John C. Reilly picking through a Cobb salad be more interesting, it would qualify as humanitarian relief in the wake of this turd of a movie.

We begin with Zach (Dane DeHaan) in the grocery store arguing with a clerk because the store doesn't sell black napkins for funerals. The punchline of this scene is told flatly from the clerk: "Um, try a party store." It’s all downhill from here. Zach is going to his girlfriend's funeral, where it takes half a dozen scenes to establish that the girlfriend is Beth (Aubrey Plaza) and she died from a snakebite while walking through the woods. We don't see this scene because it was presumably too much money to bring a rubber snake onto the set.

This is a hopeless lump of a movie, but for about three minutes it had potential when Zach starts hanging out with Beth's parents, played by John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon. Reilly, playing the awkward doofus, sits down with Zach to play chess and smoke pot, and they commiserate life without Beth. It'll be OK, they tell each other. "I love you, man." "I love you, too. Hang in there." I would have much rather watched a movie with just these two. And then the scene ends and the movie implodes shortly thereafter.

Beth, it turns out, is still alive and she's basically a zombie, though not a typical zombie. She doesn't shamble or lunge, and her bites don’t create new zombies. She's just alive and growing increasingly more unhinged. After first she's just hyperactive and aggressively sexual, which catches Zach off-guard. But then she goes homicidal, tearing apart a lifeguard shack, building a mud hut in her attic, and letting a car roll over her chest. Anna Kendrick turns up for no other reason than to spare Plaza for more embarrassment. 

The wheels essentially come off Life After Beth at this point. Plaza and DeHaan, so good in everything else they've ever been in, are paralyzed by a plot that makes no sense and dialogue that was randomly generated from third-grade book reports. Much of Plaza's lines involve her blurting out incoherently and then pouncing on props on the set. There is no comedy here. Not a single chord. Not a whisper of a note. 

As the horror continues, Zach and Beth bop around town and civilization crumbles as more of the dead rise from the grave. Eventually, Beth goes so crazy that Zach ties her to an oven that she promptly tears from the wall so she can walk through the woods until Zach does something that a producer should have done to this movie — he puts her out of her misery.

The movie is written and directed by Jeff Baena, who last worked on I Heart Huckabees, which explains a lot. He has directed an ugly movie, and a terrible one. But his movie has a great title — Life After Beth. It’s looking into the future, hopeful and optimistic. It reminds me of that moment right after I saw it, when everything felt new and pure, when Life After Beth was already far, far, far behind me. 

Choose wisely when considering Giver

Here's the funny thing about freedom of choice: the characters in The Giver might not have it, but we as audience members do. And I recommend you choose something different to watch this weekend. 

It's not that The Giver is an awful movie — it's rather splendid to look at, and the two key performances are noteworthy — it's just that The Giver is woefully broken from its premise on up. Take for example, the deus ex machina from the third act: a translucent "memory bubble." What does the bubble have to do with the plot? Nothing. What does the bubble solve? Everything. But problems begin long before bubbles blow up Phillip Noyce's incomprehensible movie based on the popular Lois Lowry pre-young-adult young adult book.

It takes place in one of those dystopian utopias where people all look like walking-talking Apple products, their uniforms stitched together by a design team in Cupertino, speech patterns that are robotic and vaguely clinical, and their bicycles are props from a 1964 World's Fair movie about "the Future." The movie has a nice look, but an empty heart. We begin with Jonas (Brenton Thwaites), who feels like he’s different than other teens, a fact corroborated during his graduation ceremony when he’s paired with the Giver (Jeff Bridges), the community's keeper of memories and a knowledge. 

This sci-fi civilization has largely forgotten its history, from dancing and love to war and famine, because everyone is required to take drugs that blur memories, suppress dreams, stifle moods, inhibit feelings and take away the ability to choose. This, we're told by the Chief Elder (Meryl Streep), is because when people choose they often choose wrong. By taking away memory, choice, history, pain and even color — the movie is shot in black and white at the beginning — the people are promised a peaceful society, but also a hollow one. And this is where the Giver comes in. He's supposed to retain all the memories from the more tumultuous days in case they're ever needed (they aren't) or in case he's summoned to provide political advice (he isn't) to the high elders. It seems like the Giver and his vault of memories are kept around because the elders are dystopian hoarders. 

The Giver, all gruff and snappy underneath Bridges' grumpy performance, begins teaching Jonas what's rattling around up in his head. They do this by holding hands so the Giver can transfer what can only be described as first-person GoPro and YouTube videos directly into Jonas' brain. Each new memory opens up Jonas' world more and more until he begins questioning the whole structure of his society. And then off he sleds to the "memory bubble" to reboot the population. 

We've seen movies, and book-turned-movies, like this before, including 1984, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Fahrenheit 451, Gattaca and even The Hunger Games movies, but The Giver seems to most closely identify with Kurt Wimmer’s cult gun-fu action bonanza Equilibrium and, strangely enough, Gary Ross’ Pleasantville, which saw modern-day characters enter into a Leave It To Beaver-style TV show. Yes, Pleasantville, like The Giver, has long segments in black and white and then slowly introduces color during its characters' awakenings, but it also nailed many of these same plot devices that The Giver fumbles. 

Pleasantville, through its inventive writing, managed to have an open dialogue about choice and emotion and passion and pain without sacrificing the moral dilemma of the film's universe. But here, no dialogue of that magnitude exists because it's all been boiled down to a memory bubble that solves everything and nothing at the same time. In the film's most awful moment, Jonas' dad euthanizes a baby in a scene that's meant to show how detached from reality the society has become. But with no moral reckoning for this behavior, the film essentially kills a baby for nothing. It's an agonizing scene that proves that not only is the character detached from reality, but so is the movie. 

Ignoring it's broken center, The Giver does look rather snazzy. The effects pop and the designs are appropriately modern. Thwaites and Bridges share some scenes that are effective at establishing their complicated roles as teacher and student, or giver and receiver (stop snickering). Katie Holmes plays an unfeeling mother in what could easily be considered a skewering of Scientology. Alexander Skarsgård, so great in everything he's in, has to kill a baby, an act from which his character never recuperates. Much of the dialogue is angular and awkward, a result of the society's strict use of "precision of language."

Really, though, there's not much to love in this movie. It's astonishingly deaf with its plot and themes, and the memory bubble finale is insulting. 

And speaking of memory bubbles, maybe there’s one this movie can be stuffed into.

Where's Vanilla Ice when you need him?

Late in the rebooted Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, the knife-bedazzled villain Shredder says, "Tonight I dine I turtle soup." Funny, because that's exactly what I was thinking. 

In one of the most blockheaded reboots to come out of Hollywood's trendy Reboot-a-Thon, the Michael Bay-produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles further perpetuates the principle of diminishing returns when it comes to re-imagining every design that was on your bedsheets when you were 7 years old. Recall how the original movies were silly fun and, yes, heaps full of stupid. Bay and director Jonathan Liebesman (Battle Los Angeles) vacuum all the color, visual gags and life from the franchise and supplant it with grit, haze and shadows. 

No one is going to try and convince you the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise was quality cinema. It was early '90s counterculture ("Cowabunga, dudes") wrapped up in a blank check to the pizza industry. It was kitsch and camp, rubber-faced costumes and pre-X-Games skateboard stunts. It was the kind of movie that pre-teen You loved, but if you were to watch it today be kinda embarrassed about. But the movie had pluck, and the plot and characters made sense. (Look at what the remake has done to me — I'm defending movies that are mostly indefensible.)

In the reboot, the plot is about as subtle as stomping through rain puddles in a minefield. It opens on Megan Fox as a journalist — the movie's first big joke. Fox is April O'Neil, a reporter at a New York City television station who says during a live broadcast, in Times Square no less, "Hey guys, I'm here in New York City …" Because all the viewers thought she was in Sheboygan, and she cleared that right up. The journalism stuff is all unintentionally hilarious, including a clueless editor played by Whoopi Goldberg, April's fact-free brand of reporting, and poor Will Arnett who keeps using the phrase "put it to bed" totally unaware that's an actual news term that means the opposite of what he's talking about.

April, the daughter of a dead scientist who experimented on turtles, gets a hunch about masked vigilantes trolling the Foot Clan, the city’s pesky paramilitary gang that operates in the shadows. She follows her make-believe leads until she finds the actual Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, hulking human-turtle hybrids with large prehistoric shells and color-coordinated masks. There is sword-swinging Leonardo (voiced by Johnny Knoxville), the leader; Raphael, the rebellious outcast; Michelangelo, the jokester and pizza fiend; and Donatello, the IT turtle who wears nerd glasses and a large headset array on his face.

The turtle’s are designed beefier and sturdier than the earlier movies. They're given lots of sewer-scavenged accessories — a bamboo chestplate, recycled sunglasses, do-rags, shell necklaces and, because whatever, a rocket skateboard — that allow them a grittier fashion sense, albeit a homeless one. The four reptiles are also entirely motion-captured CGI, giving them a creepy animated vibe. Making matters worse: none of the voice acting is convincing, or even memorable. They may be teens, but the turtles are voiced by gravel-voiced middle-aged men whose mothers couldn't pick their voices out in a vocal lineup.

Anyway, April and the turtles — and their rat leader, Splinter — team up to disassemble the Foot Clan and it's shadowy leader, who you will never in a million years guess. (It's William Fichtner and that was sarcasm.) Fichtner plays Eric Sacks, the Foot's financier who only speaks in exposition-filled diatribes. He hatches a plot to gas all of Manhattan so he can sell everyone a poison antidote. Sacks, a name that is funnier the more I read it, is willing to kill a whole bunch of people so he can be "stupidly rich," but he lives in a Bruce Wayne-sized mansion with a helicopter pad, owns numerous multinational corporations and has the mayor on speed dial — his priorities are a little screwy. 

Being that this is a Michael Bay movie, at some point a Transformer had to show up. This Transformer's name is Shredder. He's a human ninja wrapped in a metal knife-suit that could easily be mistaken for one of Hasbro's transforming robots. And like Bay's Transformers, Shredder doesn’t really have a form or shape, but rather metal tips and wings and appendages. Imagine taking a human shape and welding a junkyard to it … Shredder looks like that. 

The film’s mush of gunfights and ninjutsu is appropriately idiotic — the only thing it inherited from the original series — and takes place in the turtle's subterranean sewer plaza, high atop a skyscraper and skidding down the world's longest mountain snow slide. There are hints of zaniness, though much of it feels like a rehash of the Transformers movies, now with more reptiles. Ninja Turtles might also have the worst photography of the year: much of the movie is foggy and dark, and the 3D doesn't brighten the mud. It also doesn't help that every camera gimmick is used, from shaky cam and its stepchild spinny cam to lens flares and haze filters. It's as if Liebesman (let me repeat his credential here: Battle Los Angeles!!!) didn't want us to see his movie at all, which is actually my recommendation.

Lastly, let me talk about Megan Fox. Critics sometimes joke about bad performances, and we're prone to hyperbole, but I feel confident about this next sentence: acting doesn't get much worse than it does right here with Megan Fox. At one point she's out-performed by a pizza box, and then tube of ooze, and then four CGI turtles who live in a brick-lined tunnel made to funnel human excrement out of a city. We've know Fox was an awful actress for some time, but this confirms that she's also a glutton for punishment. She spends much of the movie being thrown from one dangerous stunt to another, but the film always has time to admire her ass. "You're a complicated chick," Arnett's character says as he drills holes through her jeans with his eyes. Fox had an epic falling-out with Bay during the Transformers movies, and supposedly she made nice to be cast here. If this is what happens when you apologize to Michael Bay, then he may never hear "I'm sorry" ever again.

So, who's ready for that soup?