Star hides nothing in tell-all documentary

It’s winter in New York and Elaine Stritch is prancing down Park Avenue without pants. This is the norm for the 87-year-old actress and Broadway star, and by the end of the movie you’ll be very familiar with those sexy — yes, sexy! — legs.

Stritch is the subject of Chiemi Karasawa’s lovely documentary Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me. Karasawa seems to have unlimited access with Stritch as she bops around Manhattan greeting well-wishers on the street, rehearsing for her new solo show and struggling with her health. The film begins with Stritch as she scoots around the city, possibly to a 30 Rock rehearsal, during which her caustic wit and flamboyant edge are on full display. “This business sucks,” she says, not a hint of irony as she grasps for her next role. 

The Tony winner is not shy. And that gravel-flecked voice, untouched by grace, is still very sharp. She has quite a mouth; her candor leads to many F words and other delicious curses that sound entirely different when said by an octogenarian. In the 30 Rock rehearsal, in which she plays Alec Baldwin’s character’s mother, Baldwin has had enough of her diva behavior. “You bitch,” he shouts as he walks out of the room. Baldwin might have been serious, but Stritch throws her head back and laughs heartily, as if to say, “Bring it.”

Cameras follow Stritch as she rehearses her one-woman show of Stephen Sondheim songs, a sequel of sorts to a similar show that was a hit many years before. We also see her flipping through her vast library of photographs, memorabilia and Playbills. She was in everything on Broadway, and has a story for each. When an assistant digs up an old photo of her and JFK, Stritch shares the story: Long before he was president, John Kennedy asked Stritch out. After the date, he invited himself up. Stritch turned him down, but always admired him for saying what he meant and not mincing words. It's a lesson she took to heart, or perhaps always followed.

Later, the actress, birdlike and frail, nearly falls into a diabetic coma. She allows herself to be filmed mid-crisis and later in the hospital, where her pantsless hospital gown is a fitting tribute to her regular wardrobe. She’s gotta stop drinking, she grumbles. Levity fills the room, though, as her unmistakable voice and personality cut through the stillness of the moment. “Dying’s easy. Comedy is hard,” she blurts outs. In many scenes her accompanist Rob Bowman, who should be knighted for his patience and compassion, cares for her as she goes through her health scares. 

Besides her performances, which are rather wonderful in their spontaneity and occasional crudeness, the film is filled with humorous little oddities, including one scene in which Stritch grows angry with Karasawa for not documenting the unpacking of a package of English muffins. “Now I have to do it again,” Stritch seethes. In another scene she refers to the hit Broadway play The Book of Norman, seemingly unaware of the actual title. Many actors make appearances, including John Turturro, Tina Fey, Nathan Lane and the late James Gandolfini — he and Stritch were pals, and the movie is dedicated to him. 

Mostly, though, Shoot Me just stand backs and ponders Stritch as a landmark to New York, a curiosity that has joyfully refused to stop working. She certainly dresses the part of a cultural institution: she’s often hidden under huge fur coats, her black-stocking’d legs extending from below her long button-up shirts with big broaches and wide ties. She often hides her eyes behind hats and these big aquarium-sized glasses. She’s the Cruella de Vil of comedy, and she's just lovely.

Divergent premiere hits Tempe theater

Screaming teen girls, many clutching thick books with dog-eared pages and worn covers, were on the fast track to lost voices and sore throats last night at the Tempe red carpet premiere of Divergent, the latest young adult novel turned film.

“It’s just that I love these books so much,” Hailey Sumtner, 17, said from the packed pavilion. “And to see the stars is a chance I couldn’t miss.”

Actors Miles Teller and Jai Courtney, who play antagonists in the Neil Burger-directed movie, made appearances, along with several local celebrities, to mark the film’s premiere in the Phoenix area. The dystopian science fiction movie, based on the hit Veronica Roth book, opens nationwide March 21.

Signing autographs, posing for photographs and working the red carpet, Teller and Courtney brought some Hollywood glamour to the Valley, the likes of which are only rarely seen in a state that shares a border with Hollywood’s home of California. Other than the annual Celebrity Fight Night and the Phoenix Film Festival, the last red-carpet event was in 2009 when X-Men Origins: Wolverine was chosen to host the worldwide premiere, an event that brought out several big names, including Hugh Jackman.

Talking with reporters, Teller, who most recently starred in the comedy That Awkward Moment, spoke about working with Shailene Woodley again after their 2013 film The Spectacular Now. In Divergent, Woodley plays a talented young warrior in a ruined world ruled by competing class-like factions. Teller plays a competitor in the physical and, at times, violent movie.

“Shailene and I are just so comfortable that it was easy to do the fight scenes. We just knew each other so well that it was natural to get in there and do it … where Spectacular Now was more about the relationship, Divergent is more physical,” Teller said. A young girl on the receiving line asked Teller if he thought of Woodley like a sister. “Yeah, but with moments of sexual tension,” Teller added.

Courtney, who previously had a large role alongside Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher and he played John McClane’s son in A Good Day to Die Hard, said much of the first film is introducing audiences to the world of Divergent and its large cast of characters and that some of the plot might deviate slightly from the books.

“You’re never going to be able to please everyone,” Courtney said. “Fans have certain expectations. I certainly hope they like it, and I think they will love it, but these books have huge followings so of course some people will complain about something that isn’t exactly like it was in the book.”

Courtney said he hadn’t even heard of the book when he was offered his role, one that involved him being especially cruel to Woodley’s character. “Mostly I was a fan of Burger’s work, so I got online and read up about everything. After some digging I knew I wanted to do it. It was all very new to me … young adult novels.”

Also at the event were the Arizona Cardinals cheerleaders, several Cardinals players, a silver-medalist womens hockey player, Harkins Theatres owner Dan Harkins and Marvin Young, Valley resident and a prominent face at local press screenings. Young is more widely known by his stage name, Young MC, whose early rap hits, including “Bust a Move,” are considered vital pieces in hip-hop’s history. 

“I was excited when I heard this was happening. It’s a big deal that we’re here tonight celebrating this movie,” Young -- whose own movie, Justice is Served is likely to be released within a year -- said from the red carpet. “I’ve read the first book already. I hope the movie lives up to the book.”

Judging by the screams of fans after the packed screening, that’s likely to be the case. Stay tuned here for a review of Divergent and full interviews with Teller and Courtney on the movie’s official release date, March 21.

Phone-heavy thriller has lots of turbulence

I liked Non-Stop better when it was called Liam Neeson Texting.

And boy does he text a lot. In the terminal, at the gate, in his seat, in the bathroom, standing in the aisle while other people are trying to get by … he’s like a teenage girl, except that instead of spam-tweeting “follow me” messages to Justin Beiber he’s negotiating with the world’s most overworked terrorist.

In this dopey air-thriller, Neeson plays Bill Marks, a federal air marshal who’s fallen on hard times and off the wagon. But ask yourself: wouldn’t you need a steady stream of scotch, and smokes in the airplane bathroom (violation!), to get you through a job that requires you to ride airplanes for a living? I was once seated next to the bathroom on a flight and by the time wheels were down I was ready to start shooting heroin between my toes.

Bill gets on a plane headed over the Pacific and almost immediately starts getting threatening texts, including this one: “A passenger will die every 20 minutes until I get what I want.” What he wants is $150 million transferred into a bank account set up in Bill’s name, which does not please Bill or the emergency responders on the ground who actually think Bill’s dumb enough to set up a criminal enterprise in his own name. Bill’s not that stupid, although the other people on this plane certainly are. 

There’s a hot-headed New York cop, a British flight attendant, Lupita Nyong’o in her first post-12 Years a Slave role, a computer programmer who looks like a discount Jamie Foxx, and a spazzy airplane woman with hipster glasses (Julianne Moore) because every flight needs at least one, usually in the seat right next to you, where the blab about their cats and things they horde, like cats. The people on this flight are the worst. They step on Bill’s toes, they act all pouty and wounded when he makes them sit down, and they seem to ignore evidence right in front of them so they can jump to all the wrong conclusions. At one point, the passengers are watching CNN footage that suggests Bill is the terrorist of the hijacked flight and all they can do is … wait for it … continue to watch TV on their hijacked plane. Nevermind that they can watch it happen live! And when they do finally rise up to stop Bill, it’s at the exact moment he needs the most help to apprehend the real terrorist. And later in the movie, Bill offers everyone free air travel, because that’s much better than dying in a hijacking. You’ve heard of Snakes on a Plane; let me present you Flakes on a Plane. 

Poor Neeson, he’s doing too many of these thrillers. He’s great in almost everything, even in mediocre dreck like this. But really, how many times can he do Taken? This movie makes him do some idiotic stuff, like test the purity of cocaine by breaking out a chemistry set and examining the powder’s atomic structure. No, I’m kidding — he pokes a knife in the bag, dabs at some coke and rubs in on his tongue because that worked in every movie from the ’80s. Let me not forget the most erotic bathroom fight that has ever been attempted at 30,000 feet. Neeson also has an awful yawn. He’s just sitting there and — boom! — his head tilts back, his eyes squint and his mouth opens and seems to suck in the entire Eastern seaboard. Why would director Jaume Collet-Serra (Unknown) allow such an ugly moment from his star? The camera even zooms in a little like it’s trying to get a close-up of his tonsils. 

Another ugly moment involves a Muslim doctor on the plane. When it’s revealed there might be a hijacker on board, everyone looks at this air traveler wearing a traditional headcovering and beard. Because, LOL, apparently racism is funny. Now, maybe this was a cultural critique of stereotypes and air travel. But I don’t think Non-Stop is that smart, a point that’s validated later again and again as the Muslim character is made the butt of several jokes, including one after a “random” carry-on search. “What?! You didn’t find anything in his bag?” one of the other passengers screeches.

There is a market for these types of frustratingly dumb thrillers, so it’s unlikely I’ll dissuade anyone from seeing it. If you’ve seen any of the Taken movies, then you’ll likely find Non-Stop acceptable, if only because Neeson has perfected this character. Although, judging by that yawn, I would say he might be getting a little bored with it.

Riding with the wind

If there was ever an animated film that was ready to burst out of its cells to inhabit our live-action world, as if by osmosis, then here it is: The Wind Rises, the supposed last film — “Eh, nevermind” — of Japanese cultural heavyweight Hayao Miyazaki. 

Miyazaki is the creator of Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro and many other films from Studio Ghibli, the Japanese Pixar. He’s 73 and the world recoiled when he said he was retiring, and then exhaled rapidly when he said retirement wasn’t really for him. Of course not. Imagination doesn’t store well; it needs to be released into the world. 

In past films the Japanese director used whimsy and fantasy to construct his elaborate visions, but The Wind Rises has a streak of realism that runs through it that may stir boredom in younger viewers, though their eyes will often grow wide and still at some of the magnificent animation. The film opens on Jirô, a serious young boy who is lost in his own head. We meet him first in his dream, where fantastical airplanes, hulking zeppelins and squid-like missiles fill the sky in a symphony of aerodynamic movement. Jirô awakes and decides right then he wants to build airplanes.

Many years later, an older Jirô works for Mitsubishi, where he and a team of engineers are trying to create the next great Japanese fighter plane. The fruits of their labor will eventually go on to wreak havok throughout the Pacific — including at Pearl Harbor, where many Americans died — but The Wind Rises is uninterested in war because Jirô is uninterested in war. He only wants to create something that will soar brilliantly and effortlessly through the sky.

On his journey are a competitive friend, various engineering partners, an Italian inventor he shares dreams with, a bespectacled little man with eyes no bigger than dimes, and Nahoko, a woman whose love and health are somehow inversely proportionate within the plot. Nahoko and Jirô, the film’s tragic core, have shared a traumatic event together, the Kantō earthquake of 1923. The sequence is animated with terrifying realism: waves of earth rise and fall, buildings crumble into heaps, fires spread from one wood-and-paper city to another and, in a haunting visual, bits of glowing embers fill the skies where Jirô’s dream-planes once zoomed. 

Aside from several dream sequences and the earthquake scenes, The Wind Rises mostly dotes on Jirô’s quest to aviation greatness. His first assignment is a wing strut; his design reinvents the part. Later there’s new building materials, recessed riveting, bigger planes, faster engines and more majestic lines. He eventually designs a plane with inverted gull-shaped wings, and then the Japanese Zero, the fighter synonymous with the Japanese air force during World War II. 

One of the more unique aspects of the film are the sound effects — almost all of them are created using mouth noises, from engines sputtering to life to dirigibles idling through the clouds to the low-rumble of a tectonic plates grinding together. I couldn’t help but smile thinking of sound technicians spitting raspberries into microphones, blowing into empty jugs or contorting their mouths as they give life to steam engines and twirling propellers. And since we’re on the topic of sounds, I highly encourage you to see the movie in Japanese with English subtitles if at all possible. Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a fine job voicing Jirô, but Hideaki Anno’s voice is much richer, with a slightly muffled timbre — it’s worth hearing.

Mostly, though, The Wind Rises is simply gorgeous to behold. The imagery is just astounding in every way. The hand-drawn backgrounds, scenes filled with individually animated people, the bits of Japanese culture painted into the edges of the scenery, the panning shots of trains chugging forward and carts being pulled through busy markets … almost every frame of this movie is breathtaking. I was especially impressed by the small details: Jirô bowing to a woman on the platform between traincars, oxen pulling a new plane prototype onto a runway, and a scene with Jirô’s new boss pointing at a hat stand and then a desk, “Hat goes here. Data goes here. Got it?”

The Wind Rises has two companion pieces. The first is Isao Takahata’s 1988 watershed anime Grave of the Fireflies, another film in which realistic horrors are visited upon delightful hand-drawn animation. Takahata and Miyazaki were colleagues at Studio Ghibli, and they both understood then (and now) that animation wasn’t confining their mature themes, it was liberating them. The other piece is Steven Spielberg’s vastly underrated Empire of the Sun, in which a young Christian Bale plays a resilient English lad whose eyes are drawn to the skies and to the Japanese Zeros that have conquered it. The character seemed unaware of “sides” in a war, as does Jirô, whose dreams are gauged by altimeter and nothing more.

This is a stunningly beautiful movie, and deeply moving. It’s also a departure for Miyazaki, who had previously turned fantastical creatures and plots into modern fairy tales. This is more biopic, but it’s still overflowing with imagination and incredible imagery. It's a must-see.

3 Days to Kill crosses the bad-good threshold

3 Days to Kill might be 2014’s first guilty pleasure. It begins as an impossibly mundane action thriller, but somewhere along the way it blossoms into a film with an absurd amount of charm and quirky likability. 

The turn happens about 15 minutes in: CIA super-spy Ethan (Kevin Costner) returns to his Paris flat to find that a rather large family of squatters, all of them impeccably polite, have remodeled his house and appropriated his space as their own. He goes to the French police, but they tell him to wait until April to file a formal complaint — “Wait for spring like birds and bees and boys and girls.” Ethan calls them “turds,” which is a confusing word for French police. “I think he’s calling us shit,” one cop says. Ethan, defeated, returns home, where his squatters try to comfort him in his new bedroom.

At this point, I’m realizing I have no idea what this movie is anymore. This is re-confirmed several minutes later when Ethan, post-shootout, argues with another CIA agent about the difference between a mustache and a goatee. The prop in the scene is an injured, bullet-riddled bad guy with a goatee, who’s kicked and rolled over again and again to prove a point about the merits of facial hair. These comedic bursts are far departures from the high-octane spy thrills of the movie’s first 10 minutes, thrills that only make cameo appearances through the remainder of 3 Days to Kill.

Later, Ethan is forced to retire from the CIA after they find out he has inoperable brain cancer. In Paris, while he tries to regain lost trust with his ex-wife (Connie Nielsen) and his teen daughter Zoey (Hailee Steinfeld), the CIA needs him for one more mission: to hunt down and kill a man known only as The Wolf, whose henchmen include The Albino and The Accountant. His government handler, a sexy vixen with a limitless budget, offers him money and an experimental cancer drug that comes in couture leather pouches. Ethan agrees, which means he spends the rest of the movie alternating between father-daughter dates to CIA-sanctioned murder.

The movie reminds me a great deal of last year’s mafia-comedy The Family, in which Robert De Niro, playing a mob boss, goes to a film club to critique Goodfellas. I wasn’t sure then, and am less sure now, whether The Family was a comedy, crime caper or something else entirely — in any case, I loved the movie's spazzy attitude. 3 Days to Kill bops around with generally the same swagger, like when Ethan puts his Italian hostage on the phone with his daughter to explain how to make a perfect batch of spaghetti sauce. Or when he barges into another suspect’s house to talk to his teen daughters about what makes teens tick. (This poor limo driver, he's kidnapped so many times that whenever Ethan shows up he instinctively takes off his coat and rolls it up — a pillow for the trunk.) The two movies, besides sharing their bizarre comedy timing, share writers — French filmmaker Luc Besson. Now, Besson’s movies have always had quirky streaks in them; think of the lighter moments in Léon, the fantasy-comedy of the Fifth Element, or the utter battiness of the Transporter movies. 3 Days to Kill taps into similar veins and you can sense the film smiling at you from behind the screen.

The movie has several comedic themes that return again and again, including a recurring gag about a purple bike, Ethan’s daughter-approved ringtone featuring Swedish electro-punk, and one of the squatter kids who insists Ethan give him high fives, even as the CIA spy escorts criminals to his bathroom for torture sessions. The McG-directed movie simply marches to the beat of its own drum. Yes, I just said McG, whose work I've panned for many years; this movie smacks more of Besson than McG, which is definitely a selling point.

Now, I did say this was a guilty pleasure so don’t go in expecting all the pieces to fit. They don’t. The movie is uneven and awkwardly paced, but it’s consistently entertaining and genuinely funny. And Kevin Costner seems to be having a lot of fun, proving that he might not be the most bankable star, but he’s still a dependable and likable one.

 

 

Secrets hidden in every furtive glance

In Secret sent me careening backward through time to the tragic loser-hero Walter Neff, the star of Billy Wilder's intensely serious film noir Double Indemnity: "Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money — and a woman — and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty isn't it?"

Though it's far removed from James M. Cain's crime novel and the movie it spawned, In Secret pulses with their passionate energies. Where Double Indemnity was an insurance scam in 1940s Los Angeles, In Secret is a love affair in Victorian-era France. Its central figures suffer similar ailments: marriage has shrunk their worlds, and murder has imprisoned them in it.

In Secret opens in the 1850s with young Thérèse as her father abandons her with her aunt, Madame Raquin (Jessica Lange), who is not pleased with the addition to her sleepy farmhouse, where her only child has a rather serious lung ailment. Many years pass and the Madame marries Thérèse, now played by Elizabeth Olsen, to her cousin, the runtish, sickly Camille (Tom Felton, Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter movies), who seems unable to discern the features of a woman from those of a travel trunk. Poor kid, he just seems constantly aloof.

The three move to Paris to take work: the women in a linen shop they own and Camille in some kind of financial institution, where papers are shuffled from desk to desk with little else getting done. At work, Camille runs into a childhood friend, Laurent (Oscar Isaac), who is everything Camille is not, including handsome and unabashedly sexual. When Laurent visits the home on Thursday game night, Thérèse can only gasp and swoon. She stands at an open window and pants, sweat dripping from her face. They begin a steamy affair that is difficult to keep hidden — in one episode Laurent hides under Thérèse's billowy skirt while the Madame skulks around her bedroom.

These affairs can never last, not without spilling over the edges of their own containment. Sure enough, Laurent hatches a plan that will forever destroy the balance of the house, their jobs and their love. Thérèse is mostly bullied into the scheme, aside from one moment of serious reflection that is interrupted by Camille, the boy who unknowingly sealed his fate with a misplaced joke.

The movie is the directorial debut for Charlie Stratton, who does a commendable job bringing the 1867 Émile Zola novel to the screen. The first and second acts are more solidly constructed than the third and final act, where the film staggers against the emotional weight that bears down on Thérèse. She has visions of dead bodies, she mopes around the house, sleeps in the store window and basically gives up on life. Much of the final act is spent dealing with Madame Raquin, who has had a stroke, her eyes trapped in a lifeless body.

The acting is superb all the way around. Isaac, fresh off Inside Llewyn Davis, is fantastic, as is Felton, who brings a boyish innocence to his tragic Camille. The movie really belongs to the women, though — Lange and Olsen are hypnotic in their tormented deliveries. Olsen's porcelain features give her a childlike demeanor, while Lange's elegant, but older, features reveal an instinctual aspect the film's young lovers can never anticipate. Generations apart, the two actresses somehow occupy the same devastating groove within In Secret’s anguished turmoil. When they face off late in the film, Olsen lets defeat wash over her character’s face while Lange, frozen in place, lets her eyes fill with terror and hate.

I must also commend the cinematography by Florian Hoffmeister, who uses mostly natural light — or candle or fire light — to paint his images. Much of the film takes place in shadows, in sunless corridors and dimly lit parlors, where dominoes are slapped on tables and lies are carefully manipulated onto unsuspecting witnesses. A scene early in the movie struck me as especially remarkable: Olsen sitting at a window, beams of sunlight shooting through in long horizontal bars and, back in the shadows, a bed with a sick boy stirring in the darkness. The movie holds the shot long enough for you to appreciate its composition.

If you’ll recall how Double Indemnity ended, then you’ll know some of the paths In Secret will be traveling. It’s not a pretty route. In fact, it’s terrifyingly dark and morose. But it’s an interesting period piece, one full of remarkable performances, finely detailed costumes, exquisite lighting and a finale that will suck the wind from your chest.

Angels, demons collide in vapid fantasy romance

A Winter’s Tale is undiluted romance. Cut it with some sugar and water and you’re likely to get a quadrilogy of sappy love stories.

This movie knows its audience and preach-panders directly to it. I don’t want to generalize and say the audience is women, but it’s mostly women. They’ll adore this movie. They’ll cherish every innocuous detail, every pretentious prop, every whispered stanza of romance. It will live on in their spongy lovelorn hearts as the ultimate personification of emotional tenderness, sacrifice and redemption.

Listen, I’m going to complain about this, but please understand this is the way it goes: men get dragged to these movies and, after a brief window of whiny complacency, they shrug their shoulders and admit the movie wasn’t made for them. This is my window to complain. 

A Winter’s Tale plunges headfirst into lady culture. It’s about a girl effortlessly playing the piano, the exchanging of miracles, flying magical horses, princess kisses, charcoal drawings of feminine figures, cute little girls in overly large woolen mittens, beds of roses, an abundance of star metaphors, boxes full of sentimental mementos, cancer scares and eternal love sprinkled in the cosmos. This laundry list might sound exaggerated, but I promise you it’s entirely accurate.

It begins in the 19th century when an immigrant family is turned away from America at Ellis Island because the husband has some sort of contagious disease. In the New York harbor, before a boat takes them back to their home country, the couple stuffs their baby in a wooden model boat and sends it sailing toward Manhattan — because pulling a Moses on your infant is better than, oh I don’t know, being a parent. The baby grows up to be Peter Lake (Colin Farrell), a masterclass thief whose special move is using a comically large grappling hook to shimmy up the front of Brownstones in broad daylight.

After running afoul with henchman Pearly (Russell Crowe), Peter prepares to leave the city on an especially agile horse that won’t gallop away until Peter makes one more score. This horse is a bad influence, but nevertheless Peter Bat-grapples into the home of Beverly Penn (Jessica Brown Findlay), who is home sick with “consumption,” which means she has to stay icy cold like a comic villain. They meet in the parlor, her at her piano banging out Brahms and he with his pistol unholstered and his burglar bag empty. She invites him in for tea. Of course, they fall in love. 

What happens next I wasn’t prepared for: angels and demons reveal themselves as vital players in this otherwise sleepy game of romance. And when I say angels and demons, that’s not allegory or metaphor, but actual angels and demons. Pearly plays the demon, and he has a scene where he ventures to meet Lucifer, who turns out to be Will Smith in a cameo so nutty it felt like a product placement for Planters. Lucifer and God have an agreement that neither angels or demons will interfere too much in the lives of humans. “Lou” has to tell Pearly to back off a little, which makes him even more sinister.

Meanwhile, Peter, who might be an angel, has to escape from Pearly without endangering Beverly and without using his “miracle,” which is apparently something he can just give away to anyone, although I first thought it was Beverly’s virginity which also figures into the plot. Before he knows it, though, Peter is waking up in modern-day New York City and trying to right more than a century of wrongs. And Pearly, his crime den now filled with flat screens instead of blackboards, still has a chip on his shoulder for the one who got away.

Yeesh, this movie. It just keeps going and going. And as the dialogue gets blander and blander (“You are my distant star, bright and special … blah, blah, blah”) the acting grows more and more frustrating. Beverly is interesting, if only because her medical condition is so laughably odd. She has to sleep in tents in the winter, walk through the snow in nightgowns, and take icy baths when her hand can fog a mirror. If only they had a refrigerator they could stuff her into like that baby and the boat. Farrell is also intriguing, even though I never thought he knew what was happening. I can picture him on the set asking questions and then shrugging, “Bollocks, it’s easier when I don’t know.”

The movie is directed, written and produced by screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who worked tirelessly for many years to bring Mark Helprin’s novel to the screen. While I thought A Winter’s Tale was tirelessly self-involved and plotted, I must acknowledge that fans of these types of movies will likely adore all that transpires. Two women sitting near me were unabashed by their infatuation for Peter, Beverly and their magical tale; when the movie ended, they were in puddles. I also must admit that his movie makes much more sense than anything in the Twilight series — not a difficult feat, though.

And a quick word on women and Valentine’s Day movies: I’ve made some cheap jokes here about how A Winter’s Tale is a woman’s movie, but we live in a changing world, where a woman might soon be in the White House, a gay man might soon be in the NFL and the pictures on bathrooms doors are merely suggestions for bathroom users. The gender landscapes are ever changing. Women will appreciate this movie, but they won’t be the only ones. If a movie brings joy into your life, then it has succeeded at something.

My heart does go out to spouses and dates, no matter the gender, though — grumble silently without ruining it for anyone else. It'll be over soon enough.

This is why classics should not be remade

Everything that takes place in the RoboCop remake could have, hypothetically, been gleaned from the poster of the original RoboCop or perhaps the Netflix synopsis, which begs the question: did anyone actually watch the original?

I ask because the remake is a misfire in every conceivable way. Where the original was inventive with its science fiction and laced with social commentary, this one is tone deaf to its own existence, blasting through all the subtlety and nuance that made the original so wickedly prescient.

My heart goes out to RoboCop’s director José Padilha, who expressed publicly that the studio was meddling and refused him the latitude to create a film with any semblance of personality, or even just some nervous tics. At the same time, Padilha wasn’t even able to pull off a mediocre hit — he blew right past “mediocre” on the freefall into oblivion — which says a lot for his work, studio meddling or not.

In fairness to all parties, though, Paul Verhoeven’s work is often misunderstood. Starship Troopers is a great example. Ask the fanboys why they love it and they’ll say two things: space marines killing bugs and co-ed showers. But the film was richer than that, with its layers of pre-Internet “Want to know more?” infotainment and its fascist regard for the military, like a science fiction version of Triumph of the Will. Starship Troopers was an idea movie pretending to be a dumb genre picture, the same of which could be said, in varying degrees, to Verhoeven's Basic Instinct, about icepicks and underwear-free interrogations; Totall Recall, about a talking head prosthetic and three-boobed women; and even the reprehensibly bad Showgirls, about gratuitous nudity and bad acting, the subtext of which was gratuitous nudity and bad acting.

This RoboCop, though, has no big ideas, or thoughtful subtext, or social commentary. It’s essentially exactly what the title suggests: a robotic man becomes a police officer. It stars Joel Kinnaman as Alex Murphy, a detective in Detroit’s embattled police department. Detroit, by the way, isn't so much a shithole like in the original movie, but a gleaming Manhattan clone. While the real Detroit is in shambles, here was a perfect chance to say something about the failure and potential redemption of the Motor City — alas, an opportunity wasted. Anyway, Murphy is nearly killed in a bomb blast that leaves him with nothing but a hand, head, heart and lungs. His major organs are contained in jars hidden beneath an alloy exoskeleton. His metallic body is brought together in one of those Iron Man chambers, where all the pieces come up from the floor to assemble. 

He’s created by OmniCorp, a drone manufacturer that's sending tactical unmanned robots and tanks into Afghanistan to obliterate every 10-year-old holding a kitchen knife. Omnicorp wants to bring drones to the United States, but they need a test case to woo Congress to throw out a law banning artificially intelligent drones. Murphy, his meaty stumps still simmering from the bomb blast, is that test case. If you’ll recall in the original, Alex Murphy had his brain wiped clean before becoming the cyborg cop. Here, though, this Murphy is aware of who he is, which requires all sorts of family drama with his wife and his son, whose only identifying characteristic seems to be that he likes hockey. (Screenwriter 1: “How do we make this kid more three-dimensional?” Screenwriter 2: “Give him a hobby he obsesses over. Brilliant.”)

For a brief spell right in the middle of the movie, RoboCop does exactly what he’s programmed to do — he arrests bad guys. He does this by using a huge database that crosschecks mugshots with surveillance footage, which leads me to ask an obvious question: Why haven't the regular cops done this? 

The movie can’t decide what state Murphy's brain is in. He begins with all his memories intact, and an obvious case of post-traumatic stress disorder, but then the plot requires changes to his brain chemistry: too much dopamine, not enough, microchips are removed, then they’re put back and the whole time Murphy bounces from one emotional state to none at all. One day he can bump fists with his partner (the great Michael K. Williams in a wasted role) and the next he barely recognizes his weepy wife while reclining in a Tron lightcycle. Recall the original film and how neat this was all handled: Murphy’s memories slowly creeped into RoboCop’s programming, suggesting that the human spirit could never be overwritten. Now contrast that with this mess. The difference is night and day.

Mostly, though, the RoboCop reboot is just stupid moviemaking. It takes close to 65 minutes to get RoboCop on the street, and even then he has to go through the most mindless training program, some of it while listening to yodel-sampled dance music (witness the madness of “Hocus Pocus” by Focus here). The film frequently teases bigger ideas (drones in Afghanistan, the ethics of robotic people, the ineptitude of Congress, FOX News' wacky slant) but all lead to dead ends and hollow payoffs. Even Michael Keaton, doing his best Michael Keaton impression, struggles as the film negotiates its murky waters. This movie is so stupid that when it pans across the dome of the US Capitol, the Washington Monument piercing the sky in the background, the bottom of the screen reads “Washington D.C.” because apparently it needed to be stated. And there’s poor Kinnaman, stuck in that ghastly suit, his career’s metal-plated albatross.

All those memorable scenes of Verhoeven's RoboCop shooting through skirts, wrestling politicians through drywall and making those awful speeches quoting the police code to victims have been replaced with mindless shootouts and vapid action sequences that your brain will forget, delete and write over as they’re happening in real time. Not that this film had to quote its predecessor verbatim, but it did have a legacy to upkeep and it fails on the most basic levels.

Many films have been questionably remade: Psycho, Godzilla, Willy Wonka. Each is their own brand of awful, but RoboCop might be the new gold standard for remakes that just don’t get it.