So much for the 21st Century - Cop Out Doubletake

The title “Cop Out” is no accident.

Man, is this a bad movie. Like, roll-up-a-newspaper-and-swat-it bad, because this movie does to your mind what a new puppy does to grandma’s Persian rug.

It’s the first movie Kevin Smith has directed without also serving as a writer, and it actually makes clear what a good writer he is. There are several very Smithy flourishes in “Cop Out,” but what’s missing is his truly unique voice. In a lot of ways it seems that everyone involved set out to do a by-the-numbers buddy picture – Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis emphatically debate the pronunciation of the word “homage” inside the first five minutes - it’s just that it’s tough to parody a genre that’s already pretty much a parody of itself. Despite a number of clever, and even laugh-out-loud moments, “Cop Out,” puts its run-of-the-mill, generic, borderline racist story ahead of the funny at almost every turn.

It says something that the most shining moments in the movie are the most incidental. I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but everything gets a hell of a lot shinier whenever Seann William Scott is onscreen. His bizarre, over-the-top wackball pours a little juice into this jalopy, but he only gets a total of about ten minutes onscreen. The other standout supporting player is the lady who catches him while he’s trying to burgle her house. Her string of self-censored curses is the funniest scene in the movie. Which makes me a sad rabbit.

The structure is all over the place. There are extraneous relationships and plot strands that go nowhere (my only problem with Radha Mitchell in lingerie on a nanny-cam is that it was in this movie, where it both wasn’t funny and didn’t add anything to the story). The first twenty minutes is a nigh-unwatchable mess. Once Jim (Bruce Willis) goes to sell a baseball card to finance his daughter’s wedding, things pull together a little bit. The card gets stolen and voila, a clearly defined goal. For one of the two characters who are onscreen for ninety percent of the movie.

The other character, however is Tracy Morgan’s Paul. I suppose the level to which you enjoy “Cop Out” will depend largely on how you feel about watching a grown man behave like a developmentally challeneged middle-schooler for an hour and a half. He manages to channel the same shtick to more productive ends on 30 Rock, where at least there’s a bit of a wink, but here…man, childish histrionics is not the same as comedy. Like everyone else here, he’s got a few choice lines, but by and large he’s the biggest nail in the lid of this turkey. Maybe it’s my elite East coast liberal education talking, but on top of his general lack of funny, watching a grown black man behave like an idiot for money for 90 minutes just feels kind of dirty. But you know what? Who am I to tell Tracy Morgan he can’t be the next Adam Sandler? It is the 21st century, after all.

Shutter Island: Double Take

Scorsese’s newest movie film, Shutter Island, sticks close to the director’s strengths of something I like to call “captain obvious makes an experimental film.” But because it’s Scorsese, girl, it works. We start out with Scorese’s man-boy muse, Leonardo Dicaprio, as Marshal Teddy Daniels, investigating the disappearance of a psychopathic murderer from Shutter Island, home for the criminally insane.

The stilted acting, heavy handed dialoged, and too-loud dramatic music of the first five minutes were a stunning choice by Scorsese. It was like watching a 1950’s movie where Marlon Brando never happened to acting. But such deliberate direction could only mean that something mysterious was going on. Were we about to watch a honest to gawd B Horror movie? Were the characters just pretending to be who we thought they were? The first moment of “natural” acting didn’t occur until we meet the patients of the asylum. Yes, they were crazy, but they were real people compared to wooden Marshall Teddy Daniels.

It doesn’t take long to realize that there is something very wrong with Shutter Island. And it takes even less long to learn that Marshall Daniels is not just there for business. He has been damaged both by WWII and the death of his wife in a fire set by a patient he suspects might be hidden on the island. By the second day a hurricane hits, disabling the mainland ferry, of course, and more and more people seem to be telling Daniels, he ain’t ever leaving this island. His desperation and devotion to his wife’s ghost make Daniel’s head a horror film as much as the real horror film going on around him.

Although, to call Scorcese’s move a horror film is not accurate as much as you could call “Age of Innocence” or “Raging Bull” horror films. There is suspense; of course, quick pans revealing disturbing things, people jumping out at you, a wall of rats, and many, many…too many…images of dead children. But the best part about Shutter Island is, that as mediocre as I found the story to be, Scorsese’s wonderfully heavy-handed direction makes everything even lame seem like a bold production choice: His metaphors that involve showing you something, and then explaining to you what you were meant to get out of what you just saw…his many dream sequences and flashbacks to (thanks Scorsese!) piles of dead Jews…and children…the three big info dump scenes, which could easily be called “exposition crypt” “exposition cave” and “exposition light house”…well I just feel like I am watching a goddamn good ole’ American picture. I can’t bristle under that kind of enthusiasm.

Mini Spoiler alert: In the end there is a major twist, of course. And it’s not like the audience wasn’t expecting SOMETHING, but rather… which one of these three more obvious twists it will be? Thanks to “exposition light house” we knew the answer. Because Ben Kingsley told us in a lot of detail. And then Scorsese showed us a flash back of it. Which was just the way it should be. I give it 4 Daniel Day Lewis’ out of 5.





(This x4)






Just don’t see it if you have kids. Seriously. There a lot of dead kids.

"Cop Out" - Take-lette

I hate buddy cop comedies and smart people acting stupid. I can't deny that I laughed...but I felt bad doing it due to the levels to which people I like stooped to make them happen.

"Cop" a Feel - Take

“Cop Out” is the first feature feature film directed by Kevin Smith that is not also written by Kevin Smith. It proves beyond a doubt that he is a very talented...writer.

In a related story, I built a time machine, went back to when I was working at the sub shop and ordered a sandwich from myself – a 6-inch tuna with cheddar, no mayo – thus opening a hole in the fabric of space-time to a dimension where Kevin Smith and M. Night Shyamalan team up to make a movie that is both decently written and visually appealing, since neither one of them seems to be able to pull that off over here.

The level of enjoyment you will get out of “Cop Out” will be directly proportional to the level of enjoyment you get out of Tracy Morgan acting(!) stupid and Bruce Willis acting like Kevin Smith has his beloved German Shepherd, Ulrich The Untamed, tied up in the trunk of his car somewhere.  Between Morgan and Seann William Scott, who is still paying off his Karmic debt for indirectly dragging a growing succession of struggling young actors into roles as Stifflers (I caught 2 minutes of “American Pie Presents: Band Camp” on Comedy Central last week – and I do mean caught. My doctor says if I apply the ointment 4 times a day, the rash should clear up in a week or so), there’s more mugging in this movie than there was in the stairwell of my apartment building before they started putting pepper spray in the vending machine.

The movie is “written” by TV veterans Robb and Mark Cullen, but if I were them, I would probably just go back to sticking extraneous consonants onto the end of my name. The alleged “plot” follows Paul Hodges (Morgan), an NYPD detective who has to recover a stolen baseball card to pay for his daughter’s wedding. Bruce Willis plays a jaded, hardcase, wisecracking, bald-headed, seemingly invincible, borderline sociopath who is somehow also gainfully employed by the NYPD.  He is playing that part, however, in a Renny Harlin movie about killer traffic lights when he accidentally wanders onto the wrong set and Hodges, believing him to actually be John McClane, hits him over the head with a sack of nickels. He then spends a full three minutes of screentime cooing into Willis’s ear, “We’re buddies and we’re cops.” It’s pretty weird.

Over the course of the movie, Willis comes to appreciate Hodges’s unorthodox and inept brand of police work, while Hodges just keeps bugging Willis about the time he shot that guy even though he had diplomatic immunity. Eventually they get the baseball card back from the mobsters who stole it, but its corner gets bent in the climactic gun battle, downgrading it from “mint” to “very good” condition. So Hodges’s daughter has to settle for having her wedding in the alley behind Gray’s Papaya, which is really just as well because she was getting kind of all Type A about everything anyway.

The Wolfman - Doubletake

"The Wolfman" is clearly a labor of love for the director (and, I'm guessing, the star - Benicio Del Toro - as he's listed as one of the producers). Monster movies, the classics from the 1930's and 1940's, are the kind of art-cinema classic that endear themselves to the minds of those who watched them as young children. In a lot of ways, Joe Johnston's "Wolfman" mirrors Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of "King Kong." But where Jackson was painting on a myriad of canvases -- 1930's Hollywood culture, the foreboding Pacific, Mysterious Islands that time forgot, and the spangley new world metropolis of New York City, Johnston's story has a lot less fun ground to cover. Which in essence sums up "The Wolfman" -- less fun, or at least not as fun as you want it to be.

The film opens on the gray/blue, brown/gray village of Blackmoor (a place we're stranded for most of the proceedings). Lawrence Talbot (Del Toro) is called home from a very long absence to help search for his missing brother, only by the time he gets there his brother's status has been upgraded from missing to dead (oh, what did we ever do without cell phones?). Upon tersely reuniting with his father (Anthony Hopkins) and consoling his brother's grieving fiancée (Emily Blunt), Lawrence sets out to avenge the death of his brother by finding and killing whomever or whatever rent him into an unrecognizable pile of meat.

The plot moves briskly through these beats. Save for one strange stroll down memory lane in which Lawrence recalls his mother's suicide, it's not long before we get to the gypsy camp (at which many of the townspeople's fingers are pointing and where Lawrence's brother was known to have been brokering deals) and we get our first full encounter (well, at least in swift-moving darkness) with the beast in question.

And what an encounter it is! While the movie faithfully (ploddingly, at times) reproduces the stuffy Victorian business of it's spiritual (and literal) namesake, the one place where the stakes go up is the gore factor. Dismembered limbs, heads torn from their shoulders, gaping wounds of ribbon-slashed faces, the movie pulls few punches in this department yet saves from lingering too long on any particular horror, so as to artfully supply the wall between gore and fetishism (the latter being the purview of more say the "Saw" franchise and the like).

The beginning of a running theme that all but the completely un-cynical would have already guessed before entering the theater begins here -- the movie tends to get markedly better when there's a wolfman on the prowl. I'm not giving too much away, given that the title character must be bitten in order to be infected ("lycanthropy" they whisper) that there are more than one wolfmen in the film, and each iteration is lovingly rendered in both the oft-highly scrutinized transformation sequences and in full form - hairy brutes that owe much, if not all, in terms of design to their 1940's inspirations. Gone are the hulking wolves of the "Underworld" or "Twilight" movies. These here are gen-u-ine wolf MEN. A great credit is due the effects team in particular, as each wolfman bears eerie resemblances to the actors from whom they transform.

Things don't go well for our hero, as you can imagine, and it isn't long before the action takes a welcome and dramatic shift to London. Everything is better in London, and here is where the movie shines brightest. The stakes are higher, the streets are clogged, and it's the one point in the film where we start to feel maybe we don’t know exactly how these dots are going to connect. The somewhat surprising revelations delivered by the not-so-surprising villain (there's a very early bit of foreshadowing that will likely tip you off, though some gender reversal is involved to make it work and don't read too hard into the allusion or it falls apart) isn't exactly what we expected, and adds a layer of convolution and confusion to what had been, up until this point, fairly staid and two dimensional characters. Genre films populated entirely by cardboard emotions can work, and while we all love to see more fleshed out reasoning and depth in our film's villains and protagonists the worst is when that transformation from 2D to 3D gets mangled along the way and we wind up with a lot of deformed, partially realized dramatization and emotional plot holes.

A combined failing of the actors and the director. The former problem is most particularly perpetrated by Sir Anthony Hopkins, who misses a lot of opportunities to sink his teeth in (no pun intended), instead eschewing towards the subtle. Understandable given the period of the piece (the lips of the British have never stiffer) but lamentable for the film as a whole. The latter failing from the director comes from a clear focus on style and the beast over a more coherent emotional message from the actors. At no point are we confused by certain revelations, but they fail in raising the stakes emotionally and as such only serve in wasting the filmgoers' time. Del Toro is notably restrained but still manages to occasionally smolder, the flip side of the extroverted types he tends to be known for. Emily Blunt is the best of the lot, putting a lot of fresh and real into a film that feels, in many ways, like it belongs in another time.

Shutter Island: Take

Scorsese’s newest movie film, Shutter Island, sticks close to the director’s strengths of exploring the darker sides of human nature. Surprisingly, it is also the most cheerful film he has made to date! We start out with Scorese’s man-boy muse, Leonardo Dicaprio, investigating the disappearance of a psychopathic killer from Shutter Island, home for the criminally insane.

Dicaprio’s investigation seems pretty slow until you realize that it’s all an allegory to the 17th century Holland Tulip Wars. Believe me, that little factoid adds much appreciated clarity to all those times Ben Kingsley stares off in the distance for waaaaay to long and whispers “tulpengekte”.

Dicaprio is terrified at first at all these mentally deranged human beings, especially that balding chick with the crazy eyes (the character is called Lady Cuckoo Beans, typical Scorsese laziness), but then comes to realize that in this 1950’s world the people of the island are just the progressive thinkers, homosexuals, feminists, and future folk artists of the future! When Lady Cuckoo Beans performs a rock ballad about freedom and tulips (OK Scorsese we get it!), Dicaprio realizes that he is actually home.

The love story between Jackie Earle Haley and Dicaprio is disgustingly beautiful.

As the movie progresses, the viewer begin to feel as though they themselves are crazy. Crazy for looking at someone like Lady Cuckoo Beans, or Mad Jack Simpleton, or Black Guy (I swear, that’s his name! Scorsese!!!!), and thinking “that person is awful because they want to murder me”, when we should have been thinking “That person is SANE because they want to murder the OLD me and make way for the new, better, progressive me! Thank you!!”

Spoiler Alert!!!! You probably guessed it, but I was very surprised to learn that Ben Kinglsey and Leonardo Dicarpro’s characters were actually the same man, himself a “looney” confined to a cage in 18th century Paris along side the Marquis De Sade. But Daniel Day Lewis’s surprise monologue in front of black as the credits rolled was the real gem of the picture. Yes, it is in dutch, but you understand what he is talking about. And that is the ravages of alcoholism.

The Wolfman - Take

Benicio Del Toro's "The Wolfman" (because no one is going to call it Joe Johnston's "The Wolfman") thematically emulates all the traits of its namesake. A throwback, an evolutionary stepping stone trod upon decades ago in the history of cinema. A dark, lumbering, brute of a film that harkens back to the Universal Monster Movies of yore with a dogged devotion.

A bit too much, as the film eschews the finer points of character and acting in favor of gotcha shots in the darkness and gruesome transformation sequences. In this one, unadulterated sense, "The Woflman" is a complete success. It gives audiences a big, hairy monster, wraps it up in a bit of mythology, and drops it on an unsuspecting populace. Themes include: the beast within us all and the arrogance of man. Been there before? So have I. There's nothing wrong, per se, with going back to the well on themes like this, but "Wolfman's" diligent and tweakless rerendering of something we've seen time and again leads to very few surprises, despite the innumerable scenes in which characters sneak or run about in dizzying near-blackness.

Is that such a bad thing? We all get on roller-coasters, time and again, knowing exactly where the twists and turns are going to be, yet thrilled all the same. Sure a new and different roller coaster might makes us think more critically about roller coasters -- all right, this metaphor is going off the rails, but you get my drift. If you're looking for a post-modern, hip reimagining of the Wolfman, Wolfmen, or monsters in general, look elsewhere. If you still get excited about the pure visceral thrill of the monster movie, then "The Wolfman" just might suit you.

Just try not to put too many expectations on the actors who are -- unfortunately in the cannon of monster movies (save for a rare few) -- all but gasp and gore fodder for the titular beast(s) they face. Hopkins wears a creepy grin for much of the proceedings, and you can almost see him spending the paycheck in the back of his mind. Del Toro and Blunt are serviceable yet secondary to the director's true star, Wolfy himself. Both play their parts with rudderless aplomb, but clearly the love goes to the Werewolf. Transformation scenes abound, gratuitously long sequences in which there is much running and off-screen rending (a minor quibble -- despite it's R rating, the camera seems a bit shy of the gorier money shots) pick up the pace of the second half. The first half, as is the tradition, being a bit bottom-heavy with the weaving of mica-thin themes and characters -- a paper house being built for the sole purpose of being destroyed later.

"The Wolfman" is, in reality, more of a Zombie movie. Resurrected and gussied up for modern times, yet with no more substantial changes from the films of the 1930's save for the gore factor, this movie will appeal to hardcore monster-movie buffs and few else.

Ironing Out The Details

When I was growing up, “sequel” was a dirty word. It was the heyday of Rambo, Rocky, Jason, Freddy, and “Police Academy.” I could count the number of sequels worth even a passing glance on one hand: “The Godfather, Part II,” “Evil Dead II,” “Star Trek II” “The Empire Strikes Back,” and “Aliens.”

These days, I need a couple extra hands. "Toy Story 2." "Spider-Man 2." "X-Men 2." And more recently, "The Dark Knight." Especially for comic book and fantasy movies, once filmmakers have divested themselves of the obligation to cram an origin story and an actual story into the same movie, sequels offer the chance to build on an established narrative foundation. Lately it seems it's that third “I” that’s the kiss of crap: witness “Batman Forever,” “Spider-Man 3” and “X3.”

So…Iron Man 2: eighties sequel, or oughts sequel?

The story picks up where the first one left off. Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) has made his double-life public, flaunting his alter ego at every opportunity. Without a righteous moral struggle, Iron Man has gone from avenging hero to marketing tool. He’s a hero, but a hollow one, a shell. Stark himself is riding high, not realizing how close he is to sliding back into his former narcissistic nihilism. Where the first movie was - in some scenes literally – a battle for Tony Stark’s (electric) heart and, in a way, the story of Stark’s war against himself, the second begins with him finally feeling whole.

So you know that won't last for long.

As in the first film, the unintended consequences of Stark’s actions are the engine that drives the plot. In this case, those consequences take the form of formerly-imprisoned Russian genius scientist and Bond-villain-level crazy guy Ivan Vanko, played by a metal-toothed and bizarrely accented Mickey Rourke. Stark’s father stole some of Vanko's ideas years earlier, then had Vanko deported to keep him from challenging the elder Stark’s patents on his inventions. So when Stark’s mysterious industrialist rival Justin Hammer (a wonderfully slimy Sam Rockwell) approaches Vanko with stolen Stark Industries blueprints and asks him to build a prototype that can compete with the Iron Man armor, Vanko gets to work building himself an ugly but effective exoskeleton complete with 12-foot-long laser whips.

Naturally.

By the time Vanko unveils his creation in the most visceral of the movie’s action set-pieces, a Formula One race Stark is competing in for charity, Stark’s world has already started unravelling. A seductive new employee, Natasha Romanov (a crimson-tressed Scarlett Johansson) is turning Stark’s head at the office and arousing the suspicions of his ever-faithful girl Friday Pepper Potts (a returning Gwyneth Paltrow, again adding warmth and depth to a role that could easily have been thankless and demeaning); he discovers that the arc reactor in his chest, the thing that’s supposed to be keeping him alive, is actually killing him; and while he’s still reeling from the race track attack, he’s assaulted by a squadron of soldiers in armor eerily similar to his own. After barely escaping with his life, he finds out the attack is a direct result of his refusal to turn over his Iron Man technology to the DOD. Instead, Defense went into business with Hammer, who used the same stolen Stark technology he gave to Vanko to land a contract for an army of armored supersoldiers. This information stokes Stark’s moral fire and his goal comes into focus: to regain control of his technology and to track down the mole who has been delivering it into the proverbial “wrong hands.”

Now on the defensive against Vanko, Hammer, the U.S Government, and an internal mole, Stark enlists the services of his estranged friend, James “Rhodey” Rhodes to help him dig his way out of the morass he find himself in. In the film’s one recast role, Don Cheadle, a fine actor, ably replaces Terrence Howard as Rhodey, although I personally preferred Howard. Cheadle has great range, but is almost too sympathetic to play a career military officer – even one who goes out drinking with Tony Stark. Against Rhodey’s protests, Stark convinces him to don a souped-up version of the silver Mark II armor from the first film. Because if one Iron Man is good, two is better. Right, Movie?

While this “more is more” approach has been the downfall of many a sequel before it, Iron Man 2 avoids many potential pitfalls by following the model of its immediate predecessor and embracing its own “pop-ness.” This is not a movie that pretends to be anything more than a pleasing distraction, and benefits massively from that lack of pretension. The tragic tendency of the tentpole franchises of the last ten years is that over time, they begin to take themselves too seriously. The maudlin histrionics of Spider-Man 3 and the over-explanation of Jack Sparrow come immediately to mind. While Iron Man 2 ups the stakes from the first movie significantly, and the pathos is enough to keep the audience invested in the characters, Favreau and crew never skimp on the gee-whiz-pop-boom-bang pyrotechnics. In short, it’s a B-level movie with an A-level treatment, just like the first film. It’s popcorn entertainment – but with real butter, not concession stand gasoline.

-Aaron


Iron Man 2: Secret of The Ooze comes out 5/7/2010