Keira Knightley Floats Through The Lackluster LAGGIES

Now playing at an indie art house near me:

LAGGIES (Dir. Lynn Shelton, 2014)

Maybe 2014 is the year of the bad title (see: EDGE OF TOMORROW). Titled SAY WHEN (which isn’t much better) in the UK, Lynn Shelton’s sixth film concerns Keira Knightley as a woman in her late ‘20s lagging behind in her life with little direction or motivation. 

Although she has an advanced degree in counseling, Knightley spends her days in a slacker job as one of those street corner sign spinners - a gig her insurance salesman father (Jeff Garlin) gave her – and her nights with her doting long-term boyfriend (Marc Webber).

When Webber starts to propose at the wedding reception of one of their friends (Ellie Kemper) Knightley freaks out and flees the party, and on the way out she catches her dad cheating on her mother.

Shortly afterward she stops at a grocery store and a group of teenagers headed by Chloë Grace Moretz ask her to buy them beer. Considering it a rite of passage, Knightley obliges then finds herself hanging out with the kids in a park until late that night.

Deciding that she needs a break from things in order to get her shit together, Knightley asks if she can stay at Moretz’s for a week while she tells Webber, her friends and family that she’s going to a week-long career seminar.

Knightley is found out almost immediately - before she even spends one night hiding in her new teenage friend’s bedroom - by Moretz’s divorce lawyer father played by a jaded Sam Rockwell who jokes: “Hey, did you hear the one about the grown woman who started hanging out with pubescent kids?”

LAGGIES isn’t bad, it’s just blah. It has cute moments, and some well observed humor but there’s not much to it. Knightley does a good job, especially with her convincing American accent, as do Moretz and Rockwell but this material – written by first-time screenwriter Andrea Siegel just goes through the predictable motions.

There have been so many movies, especially in the world of independent film, about young people having trouble transitioning into adulthood – Jason Reitman’s YOUNG ADULT comes to mind – so the beats are all too familiar. Anyone watching this film will know that Knightley is going to break up with her boyfriend back home and end up with Rockwell, and the realizations that our protagonist has that get her to that point are so obvious and spelled out.

Like Moretz’s subplot about whether or not she should tell a boy she likes him at the prom, there’s nothing really interesting going on here. There’s very little conflict, and it’s light on moments of insight or drama (though Kemper puts in some of her best acting in a coffee shop confrontation scene with Knightley), as Siegel’s script just skirts the surface of these situations set mostly in Seattle suburbs. It simply doesn’t breathe any new life into the ‘wake up and take control of your life’ trope.

LAGGIES, which I would've called FLOATING because it's something Knightley's character says about herself more than once the movie, joins the sad club of lackluster indies that have quickly come and gone this year including the abysmal MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN, the depressing LISTEN UP PHILIP, and the fake film noir of THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY. Just like those forgettable films, LAGGIES doesn’t just fail to connect with audiences, it fails to connect period.

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KICK ASS 2: The Film Babble Blog Review

Now playing at a multiplex near you:

KICK ASS 2 (Dir. Jeff Wadlow, 2013)

It’s been three years since Matthew Vaughn’s super hero action comedy KICK ASS, but Jeff Wadlow, taking over the sequel as director, duplicates the look and tone of the original so faithfully that it feels like it’s only a few months later in the lives of Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Chloë Grace Moretz as “Kick-Ass” and “Hit-Girl” respectively.

These, of course, are their super hero names, but their characters' real names aren’t that important so let’s move on. Although Taylor-Johnson is 23, he can still pull off the shaggy awkward demeanor of a high school student. It doesn’t matter that in the meantime he’s played an ultra-hip drug dealer for Oliver Stone in SAVAGES, or Count Vronsky in Joe Wright’s ANNA KARENINA, here he’s convincingly that conflicted kid again.

Mainly because of her tininess, Moretz (now 16) doesn’t look like she’s gotten older either. Moretz’s confidence does get beaten down a bit, as she deals with the ins and outs of high school popularity and an overprotective godfather, Marcus Chestnut as her dead father’s former police partner, but she’s still got plenty of that stuff that Lou Grant hated. Spunk, I think it’s called.

As they set up at the end of the first film, Christopher Mintz-Plasse (you know, McLovin!) is set on avenging the death of his father, and being a mobster’s kid he is in the financial position to create a new alter ego, which he calls The Mother Fucker, and hire tons of goons to do his dirty work as he isn’t in the physical position to carry it off himself.

While Moretz retires her purple tights, Taylor-Johnson joins a group of likewise-minded vigilantes called “Justice Forever,” headed by Jim Carrey as camouflaged Christian/former mafia enforcer who calls himself “Colonel Stars and Stripes.” Carrey is here to fill in the superstar space left by Nicholas Cage, who played Hit-Girl’s dad in the previous one, but despite a showcase scene in which he leads the ragtag costumed community into crashing a poker game of a bunch of Chinese sex traffickers, he isn’t given much to do.

Wadlow’s screenplay keeps the jokes coming, mostly as one-liner asides, but a lot of them failed to make me laugh out loud. A running gag about Mintz-Plasse assigning super villain names to his hired hands, such as “Black Death” and “Genghis Carnage,” got a few chuckles out of me from the offended reactions of John Leguizamo as his assistant: “Isn’t that a little bit incredibly racist?”

Clark Duke, returning as one of Taylor-Johnson’s best buds who adopts a super hero persona named “Battle Guy, was also amusing here and there, but like Carrey, he’s seriously underutilized too.

After a bunch of set-up sequences, some of which involve inspirational speeches, with the theme being “this is who you really are!” and the killing off of just the exact people you think will be killed off, the movie attempts its climatic pay-off: a warehouse battle between the good and evil armies, with Moretz having it out with Olga Kurkulina as the muscular Mother Russia, while Taylor-Johnson and Mintz Plasse fight on the rooftop above.

KICK-ASS 2 works overtime to top the first one, but the result is massive overkill instead of fun entertainment. It beats what few ideas it has into the ground, and its strewn with underdeveloped characters, like Lindy Booth as Kick-Ass’s new love interest, who goes by the moniker “Night Bitch.” Seems she’s just there to have somebody that Mintz Plasse can threaten to get to our hero, but that unfortunately amounts to some horribly misguided rape jokes.

A story-thread borrowed from HEATHERS, has Moretz getting back at a clique of popular high school girls, headed by Claudia Lee, that dissed her, by way of having a football player pull a “ditch date” on her in front of everybody! The bitches! Moretz’s revenge consists of projectile-vomiting and projectile-diarrhea so there’s that element of gross-out humor for you.

Only if you’re a huge fan of the first KICK-ASS, should you race to the theater to see this sequel. It has ‘wait for video’ written all over it.

Maybe it’s that the fatigue that’s formed over years of super hero movies, and that the freshness of the formula has long worn off, making this seem about as innovative in the ‘let’s try to satirize the genre’ game as that failed Seth Rogen GREEN HORNET flick from a few years back, but, however you slice it, KICK-ASS 2 is nowhere near as charming or funny as its predecessor. But worse, its shock value is worthless.

 

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Martin Scorsese's Amazing First Foray Into 3D

HUGO (Dir. Martin Scorsese, 2011)

As I've reported many times, I'm not a fan of the current 3D trend. I've found it to be a headache inducing gimmick that gets in the way of, rather than enhances, the movie-going experience.

However, I was still incredibly eager to see what master film maker Martin Scorsese could do with the format, so I put my bias aside and happily donned the glasses to take in his grand adaptation of Brian Selznick's 2007 novel "The Invention of Hugo Cabret."

I was delighted from start to finish, as Scorsese's HUGO is an amazing experience in the third dimension.

Asa Butterfield portrays the title character, a 13 year old Parisian orphan who lives inside the walls of the Gare Montparnasse train station in the early 1930s. While not maintaining the station's many clocks, Butterfield spies on a toy stand run by the cold Ben Kingsley.

Butterfield is trying to finish building an automaton (a mechanical man) that his father (Jude Law) was working on before he death. Kingsley catches Butterfield stealing parts from his stand, and confiscates his father's notebook filled with important instructions.

While attempting to get the notebook back, Butterfield befriend's Kingsley's goddaughter (Chloë Grace Moretz), who happens to have a heart-shaped key that perfectly fits the automaton's key hole.

To maneuver through the mysteries of the movie, Butterfield gets help from Moretz, a wise old bookshop owner (the great Christopher Lee), and as a kind film historian (Michael Stahlberg), all while staying one step ahead of a bumbling station inspector (Sasha Baron Cohen who has just the right light comical approach to what could've been a standard fool on the sidelines role).

Butterfield learns that Kingsley is the legendary French film maker Georges Méliès, whose technical innovations in the art of movie production had folks dubbing him the world's first "Cinemagician."

There is certainly a lot of cinemagic on display in Hugo. From the inner workings of the train station's clocks, to the depth of details making up the Paris surroundings, there are a wealth of intoxicating visuals.

However, what's really stunning about HUGO is how touchingly personal a film it is. Scorsese successfully recreates the sense of wonder that he felt as a kid in the audience of a Brooklyn movie palace, with his love of movie magic culminating in a breathtaking mixture of original Méliès footage, and wondrously faithful re-creations.

Scorsese's first family film (indeed his first PG-rated film in almost 20 years) contains the best use of 3D imagery I've see yet, but it's such a work of overwhelming beauty that it would still be fantastic in 2D.

As the film's wide-eyed protagonist, Butterfield brings a lot of infectious spirit which is charmingly complimented by Moretz's precocious pluck. The subtle power of Kingsley's presence is also nicely matched with the poignancy of Helen McCrory as his wife who was once an actress in his films.

A cinematic love letter from one master to another, this film is as deserving of your ticket money as it is another Best Picture Oscar for Scorsese (Robert Richards' cinematography deserves an Academy Award too).

HUGO is one from the heart that will go down in history.

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