‘Tis The Season For Oscar Bait Biopics: MAESTRO, FERRARI, and NAPOLEON

Yes, it’s that time of year again when the studios drop the big prestige pictures, and this round of Oscar-bait biopics are for sure the most prestigious this season. As these three films, each big ass, lavish productions with big ass names behind, and in front of the camera, are going to be in theaters or available streaming over the holidays, I thought I’d give ‘em the ole Film Babble Blog appraisal, so here goes:

MAESTRO (Dir. Bradley Cooper, 2023)

Bradley Cooper’s follow-up to his acclaimed 2018 directorial debut, A STAR IS BORN, garnered criticism when early buzz revealed that the actor (also the film’s co-writer, and producer) wore a large prosthetic nose to enhance his resemblance to his subject Leonard Bernstein, but upon being incredibly charmed by Cooper's lush, loving tribute to the iconic composer/conductor, it is not a critique that holds much weight.

For the nose just fades convincingly into the face of Cooper’s Bernstein, or Lenny to his friends, fronting a lived-in, layered, and authentic-feeling performance that is sure to get plenty of accolade action in the weeks, months, and years to come. Cooper’s portrait has a predictable structure - the narrative is initially told in black and white flashbacks (the film switches to color as it moves into the modern era) structured as remembrances in interviews by the elder Bernstein shown in crisp color - but it transcends this convention with its fluid style, and poetic, tuneful tone.

In a portrayal that rivals Cooper’s, Carey Mulligan beautifully plays Bernstein’s wife of 26 years, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein. Their relationship is the crux of the story as we see that despite his homosexuality (i.e. affairs with men), Felicia loved Lenny, and put up with his infidelities, though we witness that taking its toll.

For the uninitiated, Cooper and Josh Singer’s screenplay serves up Leonard Bernstein 101, from his debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1943 to scoring such Broadway classics as On the Town, and West Side Story or classic motion pictures like ON THE WATERFRONT to his legendary conducting of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony at Ely Cathedral in 1973, among other career highlights sharply shot by cinematographer, Matther Libatique (PI, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM).

With superb supporting work by Sarah Silverman, Matt Bomer, and Maya Hawke, MAESTRO is Cooper’s moving love letter to Bernstein, and the evolving emotional languages of the times he lived in, and helped shape musically. It’s one to stream on up when it hits Netflix tomorrow (December 20).

FERRARI (Dir. Michael Mann, 2023)

Michael Mann makes sleek, streamlined, manly movies about powerful, conflicted men and his latest fancy flick about Italian car racing entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari is no exception. A coiffed, gray haired Adam Driver plays the motor mogul in a measured, stoic manner, which is offset by the tirades by his wife, Laura (Penélope Cruz), who, in an early scene shoots at him with a gun his mother scoffs at him for giving her.

“Your mother missed on purpose,” Enzo says as he visits the tomb of his dead son, Dino. “One day, she won’t, and I’ll be in here with you.” Such sets the tone as the movie veers from the love triangle between Enzo, Laura, and his secret mistress (a possibly miscast, but still affecting Shailene Woodley) and his race track excursions in 1957, when the tragedy of the Mille Miglia occurred killing nine spectators - a profoundly disturbing shot as Mann, via Director of Photography, Eric Messerschmidt, stunningly captures (with the help of some CGI, of course).

Driver and Mann’s approach may be cold, and overly slick, but FERRARI is a purposeful portrait with a lot of gusto and glorious oomph especially in its racing sequences. It doesn't reach the heights of previous Mann movies like HEAT or COLLATERAL, but it is far and above his last works, PUBLIC ENEMIES and BLACK HAT for certain. It's well worth getting out of the house for when it opens Christmas Day.

NAPOLEON (Dir. Ridley Scott, 2023)

Since its release at the end of last month, Ridley Scott’s long awaited historical epic about the infamous French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, has gotten mixed reviews, and underperformed at the box office - bad news for a movie that cost 137 million.

But does the film deserve that unimpressive reception? Well, yes and no, but mostly yes, as it suffers from horrible dialogue (“You think you're so great just because you have boats!” is an actual line), uninspired performances (actually Joaquin Phoenix does his best with a questionably written role, but no one else in the cast offers much energy) has lengthy sequences that drag, and overall left me with an empty feeling.

This is largely because Scott’s treatment, scripted by David Scarpa (a screenwriter whose previous work including THE LAST CASTLE, and the 2008 remake of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL is less than stellar), is all about how pathetic its subject is, despite having conquered most of Europe in the 19th century.

Napoleon calls his wife, Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby) a slut because while he’s off at war, she's taking lovers, which inspires ridicule in the press, and much of the narrative concerns their rocky relationship. This material is strained, and dull, with the more successful scenes being the battles. Scott, with the aid of cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, takes us convincingly into such major skirmishes as the Battle of Austerlitz, which, taking place on a frozen lake, visually pops more than anything else in the movie.

More than once, I was reminded of a moment in Woody Allen’s LOVE AND DEATH, a parody of War and Peace that also features Napolean, where Allen’s character observes that the battle he's in looks different to the generals up on the hill, and the film cuts to a flock of sheep instead of soldiers being driven forward.

So, yeah, NAPOLEAN is a very mixed bag that proves that the Joaquin Phoenix movie to see in 2023 is Ari Aster’s BEAU IS AFRAID.

So, two out of three ain’t bad when it comes to this season’s Oscar-bait biopics.

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A STAR IS BORN: Bradley Cooper & Lady Gaga Soar In Stellar Remake

Opening tonight everywhere:

A STAR IS BORN (Dir. Bradley Cooper, 2018)

I had a feeling going in, from the high amount of positive buzz, that this film was going to be good, but I really didn’t expect it to be the emotionally powerful experience that it is.

Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut is the third remake of the 1937 classic, A STAR IS BORN, but you don’t have to have seen that, or the 1954 or 1976 versions to recognize the premise: a tragic romance in which one star rises while the other one fades.

Cooper, who also co-produced, co-wrote the screenplay, and co-wrote some of the songs, plays Jackson Maine, a country rock star who we first meet shredding his guitar in front of thousands of cheering fans. Well, actually the first shot is of him taking pills and downing some liquor backstage before that moment, but I digress.

We follow the drunk Jackson after the show as he gets his driver (Greg Grunberg) to take him somewhere, anywhere that serves alcohol only to find himself at a drag bar being serenaded by Lady Gaga as Ally, the one woman they let perform at the place because, well, she’s Lady Gaga.

Jackson is immediately smitten with Ally, and so is Cooper’s cinematographer, Matthew Libatique (PI, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, BLACK SWAN) who gives Gaga gorgeous close-ups throughout the film. Jackson and Ally hit it off and have a wonderfully rambling evening together in which she punches a fan for being pushy, and they end up in a grocery store parking lot with her hand wrapped up in a frozen pea bag with tape – Jackson’s concoction, of course.

In a sweet moment, Ally improvises some lines to a new song and before you know it the movie has its big signature anthem “Shallow,” which he gets her to shake off her stage fright and perform with him at his show the next night. It’s a glorious scene that trailers and T.V. spots have been right to milk.

You know how it goes from there – Ally’s star is on the ascent with a new album, image, and tour, while Jackson goes deeper down into the bottle. But as predictable as that sounds, it plays out beautifully here with every scene having thoughtful weight.

The strong supporting cast well play their needed notes too – Andrew Dice Clay proves that his performance in BLUE JASMINE was no fluke with a great turn as Ally’s limo driver/ex-crooner father , the always reliable Sam Elliot gives great gravitas as Jackson’s brother/manager, Dave Chappelle pops up to help Jackson and Ally get married while making some patently laid-back wisecracks, and the lesser known Ravi Gavron puts in a sharp appearance as Ally’s ambitious agent.

Adding greatly to the portrait of this couple’s relationship is how the film values the song-writing connection that Jackson and Ally have together. How they bond over words scribbled on notebook pages that become crowd-pleasing ballads is one of many factors that had me tear up at times.

This helps make the film’s soundtrack – a rich mixture of country and pop songs – a seriously stellar collection. Through the concert scenes, some of which were filmed at Coachella, the song performances really sold me on these characters feeling like real people caught up in the spotlight. In that vein, Gaga owns her first leading role by coming across more like a real person than any time I’ve seen her before. She is bound to get award season action a-plenty for her stunning work here.

Cooper will surely get some attention too for his touching take on the star on the way down. Jackson has a lot of charisma despite his sloppy drunkenness, and mean moments of jealousy towards Ally, and Cooper is equally skilled in bringing out both his charms and flaws.

A STAR IS BORN is one of the best remakes ever, and one of the best films of the year. It’s a joyous, romantic, funny, tragic, uplifting, poignant, heart-string-pulling, beautiful, and, what I said up-front, emotionally powerful piece of pure entertainment.

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GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2: Overstuffed But Still A Fun Ride

Now playing everywhere:

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2

(Dir. James Gunn, 2017)

With the summer movie season upon us, it’s easy to be cynical about big ass, CGI-saturated superhero movies clogging up the multiplexes, but the Marvel machine has a pretty good track record. A couple of times a year, sometimes three, that ginormous franchise factory consistently cranks out comic book adaptations that are mostly quality entertainment.

So that brings us to the second installment to one of the funniest, most offbeat entries in the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe), GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY.

VOL. 2 re-unites Chris Pratt as Peter Quill aka Star-Lord, Zoe Saldana as the green-skinned Gamora, Dave Bautista as the multicolored Drax the Destroyer, and the voices of Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel as the CGI-ed characters Rocket the raccoon, and the tiny tree-like Baby Groot.

The film starts by introducing us to Quill’s dad, played by a young Kurt Russell. That’s right, in a scene set in 1980, Russell via camera effects and make-up appears as his 30-year old self, and it’s pretty damn convincing. Russell’s Ego (yes, that’s his name) takes his girlfriend (Laura Haddock), obviously later to be Star-Lord’s mother, to see some sort of alien seedling deal he planted in the woods behind a Dairy Queen somewhere in Missouri.

Flash forward 34 years and we meet up with the Guardians of the Galaxy as they battle a huge inter-dimensional creature with tons of tentacles, and teeth on a platform somewhere in space (they probably had a caption saying where but I don’t remember it). The action takes place largely in the background as the film focuses on Baby Groot cutely dancing up a storm to ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky” in the foreground.

The gang’s job is to protect some powerful batteries, the movie’s McGuffin, for some gold-skinned people called the Sovereign led by Elizabeth Debicki as the High Priestess. This is in exchange for Gamora’s evil sister Nebula (Karen Gillan) so that the Guardians can take her to Xandar to collect her bounty. But then Rocket steals some of the batteries and a chase ensues with a bunch of remotely controlled drones following our heroes into an asteroid field (it’s not the only time this film apes THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, believe me).

Their ship crash lands on some planet (again, I don’t remember the name if there was one), and soon after another vessel that they had seen during the chase sequence lands. Russell, now identified as Ego, appears to reveal himself as Quill’s father, and asks him to come with him to his planet. Rocket and Groot get captured by Michael Rooker, reprising his role as the blue-skinned Yondu Udonta and his team of Ravagers, but a mutiny gets Yondu imprisoned with Rocket. This leads to another scene, one of the film’s funniest, in which Baby Groot keeps bringing the wrong thing instead of Yondu’s red fin head thingie, which can shoot a laser-like arrow through hundreds of attacking Ravagers.

Meanwhile, Quill is bonding with his dad, Ego (they even play catch together with some kind of light orb), but Gamora isn’t so sure that Ego is to be trusted. He’s not, of course, and his sinister plan, that he calls “The Expansion” involves taking over the galaxy with the seedlings planted on every planet. Ego, a character that dates back to 1966, himself is a living planet, you see.

The freshness of the first has evaporated, but VOL. 2 is a fine follow-up overall, but it’s a bit overlong and overstuffed with way too much going on - I had trouble following some of the chaotic goings on. Also my wife said she thought the father-son emotional content was heavy handed, and I have to agree. I would’ve liked more misdirection surrounding whether Ego is the film’s villain or not as well, but I guess fans of the comic would know that going in.

A new addition to the Guardians is Mantis played by an attenna-sporting Pom Klementieff, who has some funny moments with Bautista’s Drax, who keeps reminding her how hideous he thinks she is.

It was surprising to see Sylvester Stallone in such a small role - that’s right, this movie has both TANGO & CASH – as a high ranking Ravager named Starhawk (Stakar of the House of Ogord), another character that’s been around for decades but I’m just learning about now.

Russell over-acts a bit, but Ego's persona does call for it. The rest of the Pratt-led cast carries out their duties with humorous aplomb, and, like I said on the first one, Rocket may be Cooper’s best work.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL.2 is action and comedy packed enough to be the crowd pleaser its director/screenwriter Gunn wants it to be, and the soundtrack - the Awesome Mix Vol. 2 that Pratt’s Quill got at the end of the first one - lives up to its name with a bunch of toe-tapping tunes by the likes of George Harrison, Cheap Trick, Sweet, Jay and the Americans, and Cat Stevens (“Father and Son,” of course). I also enjoyed the David Hasselhoff jokes and cameo – he’s Quill’s father figure idol, you see).

The film’s bloat extends to five, count ‘em, five post credits scenes, so don’t get up when the movie looks like it’s over. I hate seeing those movie-goers that start to walk out and then have to race back or stop in their tracks to watch the stingers. Jeez, everyone should know by now that at a Marvel movie they should stay in their seats until the real finish and the actual studio logo hits the screen. It’s as expected as the obligatory Stan Lee cameo! We’re 15 movies into the MCU, people - get it together!

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Clint Eastwood's AMERICAN SNIPER: Decent But Not Very Deep

Now playing at a multiplex near you:

AMERICAN SNIPER (Dir. Clint Eastwood, 2014)

With several sequences dealing with a soldier having trouble adjusting to civilian life after intense tours in Iraq, this film often feels like Clint Eastwood’s THE HURT LOCKER.

But the crusty but lovable filmmaker, who’s 34th film as director this is, obviously feels he has bigger fish to fry here than that film’s “war is a drug” theme.

AMERICAN SNIPER, Eastwood’s new biopic of Chris Kyle (1974-2013), the late Navy SEAL who from 1999 to 2009 racked up the most career sniper kills (over 160 confirmed enemy kills) in U.S. military history, wants to both pay tribute to the man as a modern war hero, and provide a platform for his redemption as a murderer.

It’s not entirely successful in those goals, but it’s Eastwood’s best film as director since 2008’s GRAN TORINO, proving that the man is much better at capturing combat than maneuvering through the tried and true tropes of musical biopics (see last year’s ultra trivial JERSEY BOYS).

In a performance that’s worthy of the Oscar nomination he scored this week, a beefed up Bradley Cooper plays Kyle, who we follow from being a good ole boy Texas ranch hand and rodeo cowboy to becoming a celebrated Army rifleman whose fellow Navy SEALS called “The Legend.”

Cooper’s Kyle, a vessel of extreme patriotism, spends four dangerous tours of duty in Iraq, where we see him mostly stationed on rooftops providing cover for the troops below. In one central scene, which the film opens on then comes back to later in the narrative, Kyle weighs whether or not to shoot an Iraqi woman and a young boy, after seeing in his site that they were about to lob a grenade at a group of Marines on the street.

This is an intense, defining scene, one that TV spots for the film use as a cliffhanger (will he/won't he shoot? - see the movie and find out), and it is effective, but like the movie itself, it doesn't plow that deep into Kyle's character.

Kyle, who constantly calls the Islamist insurgents “savages,” does appear, in fleeting bits of dialogue, to be strongly in favor of the Iraq war, but the film itself is fairly ambiguous about it.

Kyle’s camaraderie with his fellow SEAL team members, who include Luke Grimes, Kyle Gallner, and Jake McDorman, is familiar feeling but still necessary material in the mix, possibly giving the most insight into what the film thinks the guy was like.

When Kyle is stateside between deployments with his wife Tara (Sienna Miller) and kids, he has the expected trouble adjusting to civilian life, but the aforementioned THE HURT LOCKER went through these motions much more effectively; here it’s way too spelled out.

There’s an action movie drive, which the film is really more about, to Kyle and his team’s hunt for an Al Qaeda terrorist named “The Butcher” (German-Egyptian actor Mido Hamada), and an enemy Syrian sniper named Mustafa (Sammy Sheik), in which we're simply watching a good guys vs. bad guys scenario with noisy shoot-outs and chases. All compellingly shot by Eastwood’s longtime cinematographer Tom Stern.

The big climatic battle, taking place on our lead’s fourth and final tour, has Kyle and his unit surrounded by terrorists as a sandstorm approaches. It’s truly exciting stuff, a sequence that proves how much pure machismo Eastwood can still muster at his late age.

Sure, the film hugely oversimplifies, making combat look like a video game at times, and it won't satisfy the folks who are complaining about its supposed pro-war stance, but it falls in line with what Eastwood has been saying cinematically his entire career. Consider that his iconic Dirty Harry character was considered by many to be “fascist” back in the day.

In a way Eastwood's film, via Jason Hall's screenplay adaptation of Kyle's 2012 autobiography, is like the protagonist's phone calls home to his wife; it’s tight-lipped about what’s really going down on in the guy’s mind.

It basically seems to come down to saying this guy believed in what he was doing for his country, but he was a little conflicted by it. That may anger folks who feel that the real-life Kyle had no remorse over his killings and cite passages that say as much in his book, but, for me, the movie version of Kyle never wrote a book.

That is, like all the other films that are based on true stories out there, especially the ones that are Oscar nominated, AMERICAN SNIPER shouldn’t be taken as fact. Moviegoers going in should just ignore all the pundits and think pieces, and just take it as an old fashioned war movie with a smidgen of new school conscience that features an invested, career best performance by Cooper carrying one of Eastwood’s most well constructed productions.

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Minor Marvel Characters Make Major Movie Debut

Now playing at a multiplex near you:

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

(Dir. James Gunn, 2014)

The latest offering from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, James Gunn’s GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, is for sure one of the funniest movies of the year.

Sure, it’s a big action-packed sci-fi spectacle, but for me, it was all about the laughs. And there are a lot of them, many coming from one-liners spouted by the lead, Chris Pratt (Parks and Recreation, ZERO DARK THIRTY), who carries the movie like a reigning comedy champ.

Funnier still, is Pratt’s co-star, an animated raccoon named Rocket voiced by Bradley Cooper, in maybe my favorite performance of his, who’s as much a master of weaponry as he is wisecracks, employing both in battle.

In this adaptation of a long running comic book series that I’ve been unaware of despite the fact it has been in existence since the year I was born (1969), Pratt plays Peter Quill, who we first meet as child in 1988 played by Wyatt Oleff witnessing his mother’s (Laura Haddock) death in the film’s opening moments. The young boy is abducted by aliens immediately afterwards, and we flash forward 26 years.

Pratt, identifying himself as a “junker,” flies around in his spaceship called “The Milano” scouring various planets for stuff to steal while listening to an old school tape compilation of ‘70s hits called “Awesome Mix. Vol. 1.”

From the dark, rocky terrain of a planet named Morag, Pratt obtains a mysterious orb (the movie’s McGuffin) which is sought for evil purposes by the villainous Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace), who sends the green-skinned Gamora (Zoe Saldana, who was blue in AVATAR) to fetch it.

After Pratt tries unsuccessfully to sell the orb the much more stable planet Zander, Saldana steals it from him, but a couple of bounty hunters (the aforementioned raccoon, and a tree-like creature named Groot, voiced by Vin Diesel) get caught up in their chase/fight sequence mix.

The friction fraught foursome gets arrested by the Nova Corps, an intergalactic military/police force stationed on Zander, and run by Glenn Close as Nova Prime Irani Rael, with the always reliable John C. Reilly as one of her high-ranking officers.

From there, the thrown together team joined by Drax the Destroyer (WWE pro-wrestler Dave Bautista), who’s bent on taking revenge on Ronan to murdering his family, break out of imprisonment (in a hilarious chaotic set-piece to the tune of Rupert Holmes’ “Escape (The Piña Colada Song),” and set about to keep the dangerously powerful orb away from the destructive devices of Ronan, and his boss Thanos (Josh Brolin), who you may remember from the stinger at the end of THE AVENGERS.

Also caught up in this crazy, uber colorful mayhem, is a blue-skinned Michael Rooker (HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, The Walking Dead) as the leader of the Ravagers, a rag tag posse of alien ruffians also after the orb. Rooker’s gravel voiced scenery chewing makes you believe that extreme racist redneck stereotypes will no doubt flourish in the depths of space and other dimensions.

Now, it may seem silly redundant to say that this Phase 2 Marvel movie has a STAR WARS-ian swagger to it, as every summer sci-fi/comic book contender draws upon the blueprint of George Lucas’ original 1977 space opera, but with this particular entry with its motley crew onboard a hunk of junk spaceship traveling to seedy ports thing a-goin’ on, I can't help going there.

Also, it has more than one Han Solo figure present in the rogue smartass bravado of both Pratt and Cooper, leaving Diesel’s Groot to be our Chewbacca stand-in. There’s a great running gag involving how Groot can only say “I am Groot,” and how each time (with different Diesel inflections), Cooper’s character can understand what he’s really saying, a sort of Han and Chewie-ish situation.

Bautista's Drax being able to only take things literally (“Nothing goes over my head! My reflexes are too fast. I will seize it.”) is another highly amusing thread.
The big ass CGI- saturated battle sequences were a bit too visually cluttered for my tastes at times, but the sheer amount of fun I had with what director Gunn and his co-screenwriter Nicole Perlman kept hurtling at me and the audience made that not matter so much.

Just like Pratt’s coveted cassette compilation is called, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY is an awesome mix. It takes nifty sideline superheroes, only known to hardcore comic fans, and makes major stars out of them (it's also certainly a star-making part for Pratt). But more importantly it made me a laugh a lot, while it proved once again that the Marvel formula - Stan Lee cameo included – has a lot of life left in it.

And, of course, stay for the traditional post-credits scene, which, I won’t spoil, but I will say that it hints at the resurrection of an infamous Marvel character apparently still trapped in a world he never made. That probably is a bit of a spoiler, sorry.

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David O. Russell's AMERICAN HUSTLE Pulls A Scorsese On ABSCAM

AMERICAN HUSTLE (Dir. David O. Russell, 2013)

  
“Some of this actually happened...” a title tells us up front and then we're off into one of the impressive approximations of the intoxicating style of Martin Scorsese that I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot of them.

David O. Russell's follow-up to his home runs THE FIGHTER and last year's SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK presents a darkly funny take on the ABSCAM sting of the late '70s and early '80s by way of a couple of con artist caricatures, portrayed by Christian Bale and Amy Adams, who are blackmailed into working for Bradley Cooper as an unhinged over-permed FBI agent.

Our intro to Bale as Irving Rosenfeld (loosely based on convicted con man Melvin Weinberg), takes us through how he applies what his girlfriend/partner-in-crime Adams calls “an elaborate comb-over,” gives us all we need to know about this small-time loan scammer.

Of course, Bale and Adams' documentary-style voice-overs aren't the only allusions to GOODFELLAS going on in all the set-ups, as dead-on Carter-era song choices (Steely Dan's “Dirty Work” serves as a perfect opening theme song), and grainy chaotic camerawork relishing all the garish wardrobes and decor of the surroundings, keeps a Scorsese-ian sweep going from start to finish.

There's also a good bit of Paul Thomas Anderson's BOOGIE NIGHTS embedded in the structure, but since that also had massive debts to Scorsese, I digress.

Cooper's Richard “Richie” DiMaso, who's based on FBI Agent Anthony Amoroso, Jr. can come off as much as a speeding spaz as the amped up movie around him at times, but look deeper and you'll see one of the most electric performances of the year.

More colorful caricatures (I call them that because everybody looks like they stepped out of the pages of Mad Magazine movie satires from the era depicted) crop up in the form of Jennifer Lawrence (Cooper's SILVER LININGS co-star) as Bale's bawdy wild card of a wife who may accidentally blow everyone's cover (Lawrence acts her ass off), Jeremy Renner as the idealistic mayor of Camden, New Jersey (with a very Joe Pesci-ish pompadour) who gets up in the scam, and comedian Louis C.K. as Cooper's uptight FBI supervisor.

A running bit about Cooper needling C.K. about both approving more money for the operation and guessing the moral of an aborted ice-fishing anecdote is a successful strand of silliness that kept me laughing alongside all the other in-your-face absurdity here.

Many will say its more rip-off than homage with such lame bon mots as “Scorsese-lite” to “Rhinestone Scorsese,” but I liken it to how people call a song that's in the vein of the Beatles but still has its own groove: “Beatle-esque.”

AMERICAN HUSTLE is definitely Scorsese-esque, but it has its own grooves going in its riffing on '70s cinema vibes. At one point when schooling Cooper on the art of the con, Bale asks “Who's the master: the painter or the forger?”

I'll still go with the painter, especially as we're on the verge of a major Marty release (THE WOLF OF WALL STREET opens on Christmas day) that more than tops this, but when it comes to what Russell and his crack cast are going for here, to quote Christopher Walken in a classic SNL sketch: “It's a Hell of a forgery.”

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10 Memorable Marquees In The Movies

Regular visitors to this blog (there must be a few, right?) may be aware that I have a bit of a thing for movie theater marquees. I regularly post pictures of local theaters like the Colony Theater and the Rialto Theater’s marquees here in Raleigh on the sidebar (in the old days it would be the Varsity Theater in Chapel Hill when I lived there), and I have them collected on Facebook in the “Movie Theater Fun File!” section of my profile.

So since it’s been a while since I've put together a good ole Film Babble Blog list I thought I’d get back in the game with this top 10 of memorable marquees that have appeared in the movies throughout the years:

1. THE SORROW AND THE PITY in ANNIE HALL

It was a running gag throughout Woody Allen's 1977 Oscar winner ANNIE HALL that protagonist Alvy Singer (Allen) would drag his girlfriend (Diane Keaton in the title role) to see Marcel Ophüls' THE SORROW AND THE PITY (1969). The marquee shot above comes from the end of the film, after the couple has broken up, when Allen runs into Keaton coming out of a screening of the four hour documentary about Nazis at the Thalia Theater, which used to exist on 95th Street off Broadway (it's an apartment building now). It's a long shot so it's easy to miss that Allen's date is Sigourney Weaver, in her first film appearance. A bonus Woody Allen marquee appears at the top of this post.

2. FAMILY PLOT in DAZED AND CONFUSED

This is one of hundreds of well chosen details that helped Richard Linklater's 1993 cult comedy drama classic DAZED AND CONFUSED so convincingly recreate a day from May of 1976. Hitchcock's final film, released a month earlier, appears in a few early shots on a standing marquee for a drive-in in the background of the film mostly set in the suburbs of Austin, Texas. It works as both a piece of a time capsule capture, and a shout-out to the master of suspense.

3. PLAY MISTY FOR ME in DIRTY HARRY

This, and #4, are inside-jokes. In Don Siegel's 1971 cop classic DIRTY HARRY, Clint Eastwood's iconic Harry Callahan character enters a San Francisco burger joint in one shot in which a marquee advertising Eastwood's previous film, PLAY MISTY FOR ME (also '71) can be seen around the corner. Nice plug, Clint!

4. THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN in SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK

The same type of thing happens in David O. Russell's SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK from last year. While leads Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence are arguing in front of a theater midway through the film, a marquee advertising Ryûhei Kitamura's little seen 2008 thriller THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN, which starred Cooper, is fairly visible - partially obscured but still obvious.

5. PLATOON in THE NAKED GUN

During a very funny falling-in-love montage set to Herman Hermit's “I’m into Something Good” in David Zucker's 1988 comedy classic THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD, Leslie Neilsen and Priscilla Presley exit a Los Angeles movie theater laughing their asses off. The camera pans up to the marquee:

It's a cheap laugh, but still always gets me.

6. A double feature of A BOY'S LIFE and WATCH THE SKIES in GREMLINS

The fictitious film titles on this marquee seen in Joe Dante's 1984 classic GREMLINS are Spielbergian in-jokes. A BOY'S LIFE was the original title of E.T. and WATCH THE SKIES was the early working title of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, so the fake double bill presents a double nod to the film's executive producer. This marquee has been mentioned before on this blog as has:

7. SEE YOU NEXT TUESDAY in KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE

This marquee for the phony film SEE YOU NEXT WEDNESDAY (previously covered in “Film Within Film Follow-up Fun” 7/13/07), seen in the 1977 ZAZ sketch comedy movie THE KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE is part of a running gag through many of the films of John Landis. It comes from a line from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY that the director liked enough to feature in the form of billboards, posters, and more than one marquee.

8. A double bill of DEEP THROAT and MEATBALL in SLAP SHOT

This marquee glimpsed in the background of a parade shot on the streets of Jonestown, Pennsylvania in George Roy Hill's classic 1977 hockey comedy SLAP SHOT proudly displays a double feature of Gerard Damiano's 1972 pornos DEEP THROAT (possibly the most famous porn film ever) and his lesser known, but presumably just as filthy MEATBALL.

9. JAWS 19 in BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II

I also featured this one before (“10 Self Referential Or Crossover Moments In The Films Of Lucas And Spielberg” 5/20/08), but couldn't resist including the marquee of JAWS 19 that Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) encountered in the future in Robert Zemeckis' BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II (executive produced by Spielberg) here because, you know, hologram shark! Also the fact that the director of the 19th film in the JAWS franchise is credited to Spielberg's son Max Spielberg (born in 1985) is a nice touch.

10. THE WHITE HELL OF PITZ PALU in INGLORIOUS BASTERDS

I'm including this one because I used to climb up a ladder and change the marquee a lot at the Varsity Theater in Chapel Hill when I worked there from 2004-2009. So I appreciated that Quentin Tarantino's and Eli Roth's revisionist World War II romp, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, included a scene in which Mélanie Laurent's character Shoshanna is taking down the lengthy line of letters that spell out “German Night Leni Riefernstahl in Pabst's THE WHITE HELL OF PITZ PALU.” Thankfully, I rarely had to put up that many letters.

Post note: I should definitely note the cool blog Marquees in Movies, which houses a collection of screenshots from movies showing movie theater marquees. I, ahem, borrowed that great screenshot of SLAP SHOT from them.

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THE HANGOVER PART III: At Least It's Not In 3D

Now playing at every shopping mall multiplex in North America:

THE HANGOVER PART III

(Dir. Todd Phillips, 2013)

Nobody actually has a hangover in THE HANGOVER PART III (well, except during the end credits – sorry if that’s a Spoiler!), but the movie itself is a hangover from the events of the first two films.

The premise of this second sequel to the 2009 smash hit, billed as “The Epic Finale To THE HANGOVER Trilogy,” is thankfully different from the first two (PART II was identical to the first except that it was set in Bangkok), but it still follows the same pattern of normal guys (Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms) getting more and more trapped in the circles of insane people (Zach Galifianakis and Ken Jeong). 

Writer/director Phillips shoots the HANGOVER movies in the style and tone of action thrillers; they don’t resemble the comic worlds of the Apatowian universe at all. This approach doesn’t appeal to me because the humor, what genuine little there is here, feels misplaced.

But onto the plot, this time written by Philips and Craig Mazin (also co-writer of the second one) which concerns Jeong escaping from jail in Thailand, and conning the “Wolfpack,” as Alan calls them, into stealing a bunch of gold bars from John Goodman as an angry crime boss.

Goodman, who so could've phoned his part in, kidnaps Justin Bartha, who always gets the short end of the stick in these movies, leaving Cooper, Helms, and Galifianakis to track down Jeong in, you guessed or saw the trailers or TV spots, Las Vegas.

Now, I love Galifianakis and think he’s one of the most hilarious stand-up comedians working today, but his clueless character shtick again wears out as early as the end of his second scene.

That scene by the way features Jeffrey Tambor reprising his role as Galifianakis’s father, again exasperated by his dysfunctional son’s behavior.

As the likable yet slightly douchy Phil, Cooper does as well as he can with the hectic material, and just like the last couple of entries, Helms’ characterization largely consists of being frustrated and baffled by Galifianakis’s extreme stupidity. Come to think of it, Helms functions as an audience surrogate for anybody who doesn’t think this stuff is as funny as the cast and crew supposedly do.

As for Jeong, he's doing the same over-the-top shenanigans he did in the previous films, and on Community, and both cases it's gone way beyond tiresome (especially on the post-Dan Harmon episodes of the NBC sitcom).

I like these guys, but all three HANGOVER movies are over-hyped lame comedies that have a measly minimum of actual laughs. Bet you can take all the funny moments in this one and make a less than 5-minute Funny or Die video clip out of it. 

Bet that would include a few moments of Melissa McCarthy’s bit as a pawn shop owner/Billy Joel fan that Galifianakis flirts with, and with hope would edit out the useless Heather Graham cameo and more importantly the shot of the giraffe decapitation presented as the movie’s big opening joke. It’s one that has mostly been spoiled by the heavy marketing of this movie, but be prepared to see a particularly grotesque shot more if you pony up admission.

It’s one of many places that made me so thankful that THE HANGOVER PART III isn’t in 3D like every other summer blockbuster wannabe out there. I’m also very thankful that they are promising that the franchise is closing up shop and that this will be the last one.

It better be because three of these dark gross-out anti-comedies is three too many.

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Current Indie Films Offer Big Stars Without The Blockbuster Bombast

You don’t have to wait for the summer super hero sequel season (kicking off this Friday with IRON MAN 3) to see big name stars for a bunch of them are currently starring in indie films at your local art house. 

For instance, Derek Cianfrance’s (BLUE VALENTINE) highly touted crime drama THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES, now in its 3rd week in the Triangle area, boasts star turns by Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper. 

The film tells a story set in the town of Schenectady, New York, that spans 3 character threads. Gosling’s scenario involves the bleach blonde pretty boy turning to a life of crime (robbing banks with the help of his circus-honed motorcycling skills) in order to support the year old baby that former flame Eva Mendes just told him he is the father of.

One of Gosling’s robberies is foiled by Cooper as a young law student turned cop and then his scenario begins. Cooper takes advantage of his hero status to further his career, realizing the system’s just too damn corrupt (mostly in the form of a slimy, us usual, Ray Liotta - could Liotta ever play a cop that’s not corrupt?).

The third act has Cooper’s kid (Emory Cohen) growing up to be a troubled teenager who befriends a fellow student, Dane Dehan, who turns out to be Gosling’s kid. Gosling’s and Cooper’s acts crackle with energy, but the final act lost me. It felt like it could have been incorporated into the second story-line or at least not be so drawn out. Perhaps it simply lacked the star power of the first two thirds. Whatever the case, the film has just enough storytelling drive to make it worthwhile.

Nobody could accuse Robert Redford’s new political drama THE COMPANY YOU KEEP, which opened last Friday in Raleigh, of lacking star power. Apart from Redford’s lead role, there’s Shia Labeouf, Susan Sarandon, Nick Nolte, Chris Cooper, Julie Christie, Richard Jenkins, Stephen Root, and indie darling Brit Marling. Sadly though, all this talent can’t save the film from Redford’s tired soapboxing as you can read in my review “Redford’s Vanity Project THE COMPANY YOU KEEP Is A Star-Studded Dud” (4/26/13).

Much better is Jeff Nichols’ MUD, with Matthew McConaughey in the title role, also in its first week in the Triangle. 

McConaughey, a little less confident than usual yet still somewhat slick,  plays an outlaw on the lam, living on an island in the middle of Arkansas' Lower White River, who is discovered by a couple of kids (Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland). The kids help the fugitive get a boat down out of a tree (“that’s a hell of thing” McConaughey keeps saying about the boat’s predicament) and back in commission so he can escape with the love of his life, a redneck floozy played by Reese Witherspoon (the role couldn’t be more timely with her recent brush with the law and all). 

There a few glaring narrative conveniences - the kids seem to happen upon Witherspoon too easily, and later come to her hotel room at just the right time when she’s being roughed by a thug played by Stuart Greer for a few examples - but they could reasonably be chalked up to small town coincidences I reckon.

MUD is a mostly engrossing Southern drama driven by its superb cast, including Sam Shepherd, Nichols’ TAKE SHELTER star Michael Shannon, Joe Don Baker, Sarah Paulson, and Ray McKinnon, and its thoughtful screenplay by Nichols. 

But in a cast of recognizable faces, the 15 year old newcomer Sheridan, who could be considered the film’s true protagonist, stands out. Nichols’ has given the kid thematic weight in the form of a belief in love - a belief in danger of being squashed by a crush on an older girl (Bonnie Sturdivant) and the fact that his mother (Paulson) is divorcing his father (McKinnon) - but Sheridan carries it with poise.

So, if you’re looking for alternatives to the coming tidal wave of CGI-saturated blockbuster-wannabes on the big screen, THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES and MUD will provide the stars without the bombast. 

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Holiday Season Cinema Roundup 2012 Part 1

This hasn’t been the strongest holiday movie season I’ve experienced (how could it be without the Coen brothers or George Clooney?), but it’s a pretty strong one with a few entertaining epics, a couple of decent comedies, and one big overwrought musical competing for movie-goers attention.

So let’s take a look at what’s currently playing as the year is ending:

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK 
(Dir. David O. Russell)

Although it must be stressed that this is ultimately a best-case scenario rom com, this tale of a bio-polar Bradley Cooper getting together with Jennifer Lawrence as a neurotic widower has a punchy screenplay that’s energetically (and very loudly) delivered by the leads, including Robert De Niro, in one of his most invested performance in years, as Cooper’s Philadelphia Eagles superfan father. Chris Tucker, who keeps popping up after repeatedly escaping from Cooper’s former mental institution, adds to the film’s already plentiful laughs. Director and screenwriter Russell's last film, 2010's THE FIGHTER, was a winner as well, so here's hoping he's on a roll.

HITCHCOCK 
(Dir. Sacha Gervasi)   

Sacha Gervasi’s (2008's rock doc ANVIL: THE STORY OF ANVIL) second film as director boasts a stellar cast - Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson, Toni Collett, and Danny Huston – but a not so stellar story. The conceit that every good idea that went into the making of the classic 1960 thriller PSYCHO came not from the Master of Suspense, but from his wife Alma falls flat in the midst of these fine actors being put through T.V. movie-ish motions. Read my full review here.

THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (Dir. Peter Jackson)

Peter Jackson takes us on another sweeping slog through Middle Earth in this prequel set 60 years before THE LORD OF THE RINGS series. Martin Freeman, best known as Tim on the mockumentary sitcom The Office [UK], stars as Bilbo Baggins who reluctantly finds himself on a quest with an unruly band of dwarves to overtake what looks like the Paramount mountain. I saw it in HFR (Higher Frame Rate) 3D, but, although it looked exquisitely sharp, it wasn’t as immersive an experience as I’d heard. Probably would’ve been just as well off with the 2D version.

There are some amazing heavily CGI-ed sequences, including battles and chases inside an elaborate underground city that comes off like THE TEMPLE OF DOOM times 100, but you can really feel its length (169 min.), and the idea that this is just part one of another trilogy seems to come more from greed than pure inspiration. 

But that's too cynical of me. This is really for the legions of Tolkien fans who can’t get enough of this stuff and will love spending more time with Ian McKellen’s Gandalf, and getting cameos from Frodo (Elijah Wood), and Ian Holms as the older incarnation of Bilbo who presents the story as a flashback. What I enjoyed most was Bilbo's cave encounter with the slimy creature Gollum (once again beautifully played by motion-capture specialist Andy Serkis), which is nicely faithful to the original Tolkien text.

 DJANGO UNCHAINED 
(Dir. Quentin Tarantino)

Tarantino’s blaxploitation Western is also a long-ass film (165 min!) that could’ve been served by better editing (sadly his long-time editor Sally Menke died in 2010), but it’s still a hugely entertaining epic that tackles revenge, slavery, and possibly contains the most excessive use of the “N-word” in cinematic history. 

Jamie Fox stars as a slave who gets freed by a former dentist played by Christoph Waltz who offers Fox a new job as a bounty hunter. Together, they set off to rescue Fox’s wife (Kerry Washington) from the plantation of the brutal yet charming Leonardo DiCaprio. The film drags a bit in DiCaprio’s company, which includes Samuel L. Jackson as his cruel conniving house slave, but when its “on” it's a blast. Read my full review here.

Coming soon: Part 2 of Film Babble Blog's Holiday Season 2012 Roundup.

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THE HANGOVER PART II: The Film Babble Blog Review

THE HANGOVER PART II (Dir. Todd Phillips, 2011)

The sequel to the largest grossing R-Rated comedy of all time is exactly everything I thought it would be. I haven't seen such a blatant retread of a huge hit's premise and jokes since AIRPLANE II: THE SEQUEL.

Again we have Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, and Ed Helms playing the man-child protagonists who wake up to find themselves in way over their heads after a night of stag party debauchery. I actually recycled that sentence largely from my review of the first one - I figure if they can recycle it, so can I.

This time the guys are in Bangkok. Helms is about to get married to Jamie Chung, and Cooper, Galifianakis, and Justin Bartha are there to attend the wedding.

Chung has a disapproving father (Nirut Sirichanya) who humiliates Helms at their reception dinner, so you know Helms will stand up to him in the end.

Bartha went missing in the first one, so their idea of mixing it up is to have Chung's younger brother (Mason Lee) disappear.

The night starts at a resort in Thailand where Helms is talked into having just one beer with the "Wolfpack," as Galifianakis calls them, on the beach with a bonfire. What could go wrong?

Just like before (okay I'll stop saying that - it could get exhausting) the camera pans up to the sky and the screen fades. We flash forward and we're in a scummy hotel room in the city of Bangkok. Galifianakis's hair head has been shaved, Helms has a Mike Tyson tattoo on his face, there's a capuchin monkey jumping around, and there's a severed finger with Lee's school ring on it among all the bottles, cocaine, and other debris from the previous night.

Oh yeah, there's also the crazy coked up Ken Jeong who Galifianakis invited as his +1 to the wedding sleeping on the floor.

So the 'Wolfpack" hit the streets to figure out what happened to Lee and they wind through a convoluted scenario involving Monks, she-male prostitutes, Russian thugs, and an obligatory car-chase that includes the classically clichéd fruit cart scene.

The problem is this material is geared more for shock value than laughs. The leads have an energy going in their performances, playing amusingly off each other, but while Cooper and Helms almost overdo their effort, Galifianakis doesn't seem to care.


Galifianakis can be funny with just an expression, and his eccentric childishness has its moments, but wears thin way before the halfway mark.

In the middle of it all there's a surprising appearance by Paul Giamatti, who has a nice sharp scene or 2 - I guess to go further about it would be a Spoiler!

Otherwise, despite the absorbing locale, and a few good lines here and there, THE HANGOVER PART II is a tedious, definitively unnecessary, and supremely unsatisfying sequel.

Actually the photos showing what happened during the guys' blackouts during the end credits are kind of funny, but again that's something they did in the first one.

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