Redford & Nolte Take A Hike That I Liked In A WALK IN THE WOODS

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A WALK IN THE WOODS (Dir. Ken Kwapis, 2015)



Many critics have been dumping on this movie (it’s at 52% on the Rotten Tomatometer), but I found it be a fairly charming, pleasant, and mildly amusing experience. Admittedly, it’s a corny, predictable, and lightweight mash-up of GRUMPY OLD MEN and WILD, but its leads, Robert Redford and Nick Nolte, play off each other well and generate a lot of warmth together.

Redford, who co-produced, plays author Bill Bryson in this adaptation of the acclaimed travel writer’s 1998 book “A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail,” and despite the fact that Bryson was in his mid ‘40s when he made the hike while Redford is nearing 80, it’s a role that I had no trouble going along with.

Growing more and more restless in his retirement, as we can see from an awkward TV talk show appearance and an even more uncomfortable moment at a friend’s funeral, Redford’s Bryson is itching for a new adventure. While taking a walk after the funeral, Bryson stumbles upon a section of the Appalachian Trail near his home in New Hampshire and the idea of tackling the 2,100 mile hike and getting back to nature, starts to take root.

Bryson’s wife (Emma Thompson) thinks the idea is crazy, and prints up a stack of newspaper reports of hikers getting killed by bears with a post-it note attached that says “you’re not going alone!”

Bryson calls every friend he has, but nobody is interested in accompanying him. Then he gets a call from an old estranged friend, Stephen Katz played by the famously grizzled Nolte, who heard about the hike and asks if he can go. Bryson reluctantly agrees with the offer, and the two hit the trail which starts at Springer Mountain in Georgia.

Not far into the trail Bryson and Katz meet Kristen Schaal as a judgy, obnoxious fellow hiker who sings Daft Punk songs at the top of her lungs. The two elders are so annoyed by Schaal that they ditch her and even hitchhike a stretch to get ahead of her.

From there on out, the elderly duo encounter food-stealing bears, life-altering mountain views, a blizzard, the jealous shotgun-toting husband of a woman Nolte takes up with in one of the towns along the way (a SIDEWAYS-ish sideline), and Mary Steenburgen, who always seems to pop up in movies like this, as a friendly hotel owner who flirts with Redford.

Unsurprisingly, Nolte and Redford bicker until they bond, and end up exchanging great truths under the stars while they are trapped on a ledge on the side of a cliff under the path. That sort of stuff.

There’s not much visual artistry to the film; it’s workingmanlike cinematography at best (same goes for Kwapis’ direction) by longtime director of photography, John Bailey, but it frames these gruff old guys good enough, even if it doesn’t awe us as much as it tries (or as much as it awes our leads) with its wide stretches of scenery.

Redford originally developed this project as a vehicle for he and Paul Newman – it would’ve been their third film together after their classics BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID and THE STING - but Newman had the nerve to die before it could be come to fruition (would love to see that version). 

Nolte fits the part of Katz like a glove – he’s boozy without boozing (he says he’s reformed but Redford finds a bottle of whiskey hidden in his backpack), and he goes on the hike to avoid some outstanding warrants back in Des Moines – definitely a character in the actor’s wheelhouse. Plus, Rick Kerb and Bill Holderman’s screenplay adaptation of Bryson’s tome gives Nolte the funniest, saltiest lines like “There are only two men in the world that would sleep with her, and here we are in the same damn town!”

It’s a part that Redford could play in his sleep – the noble accomplished everyman, who uses dry humor as a defense mechanism – but he appears to be having fun here; it’s a welcome fluffy break after his weighty turns in ALL IS LOST and CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER and it’s much more preferable to his own directed films of late (the preachy LIONS FOR LAMBS and THE COMPANY YOU KEEP).

A WALK IN THE WOODS is a not bad, but not great buddy road (or mountain?) comedy that boasts a couple of likable legends roughing it (and slumming it) likably. If you manage expectations and go in not expecting Neil Simon you should be fine.

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Jason Reitman's Misguided And Meaningless MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN

Opening today at an indie art house near me…

MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN

(Dir. Jason Reitman, 2014)

Jason Reitman’s (JUNO, UP IN THE AIR, YOUNG ADULT) latest film, a comedy drama (I hate the word “dramedy”) examination of relationships in the age of the internet based on a 2011 novel by Chad Kultgen, is easily his worst film. It’s even worse than LABOR DAY, and I hated LABOR DAY.

Just about every bit of it is misguided and poorly written, a pretentious attempt at cultural commentary that comes off like a guy complaining about everybody being addicted to screens and social media, but has nothing to say about it to say but ‘look at all these people on their devices, it’s awful.’ A rant by Bobby Moynihan’s SNL character Drunk Uncle is more profound than this.

It starts with voice-over narration by Emma Thompson telling us that while the Voyager satellite, which we see via CGI, is venturing through space carrying international music, pictures and greetings to extraterrestrial life, back on Earth, Adam Sandler is having trouble masturbating to internet porn.

Sandler, following the Robin Williams handbook by having grown a beard for this dramatic role, is an unhappily married family man who has to use his son’s computer because his computer is too infected with malware to use. Finding that his son has his own secret sex site fetish, Sandler reminiscences about how he discovered porn in his youth. Yeah, pretty creepy so far.

From there we head to the local high school (the film was shot in Austin, Texas) where we meet Kaitlyn Dever, whose mother (Jennifer Garner) obsessively monitors every instance of activity on her phone and PC, Elena Kampouris an anorexic high-school girl pining to be popular, Olivia Crocicchia, whose mother (Judy Greer) is always taking pictures and videos of in hopes of making her a star, and Ansel Elgort who gave up football for online gaming (in particular, the game “Guild Wars,” which I hadn’t heard of before).

Garner’s character is the film’s heavy, a cold, self righteous control freak who hosts an Internet Safety Parent group meeting in her home and deletes messages on her daughters account before she can see them.

While these threads weave in and out of each other, Sandler and his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt), both inspired by a commercial for AshleyMadison.com that turns their heads away from their laptops in bed, begin affairs at exactly the same time, but luckily at different hotels. While Sandler hires a high price escort (Shane Lynch), DeWitt arranges a date with Dennis Haysbert, credited only as “Secretluvur.”

Meanwhile, Sandler’s son (Travis Tope) is itching to have sex with Crocicchia, who’s his partner on a class project about 9/11 (yep, they went there too), while a relationship blooms between Dever and Elgort, who’s dealing with learning (from a social networking site, of course) that his mother is remarrying. But that’s good news for Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris as Elgort’s father, who begins dating Greer. Reitman regular J.K. Simmons is also on hand as the anorexic girl's kindly father.

There’s a lot of internet meddling by parents – Greer decides that selling soft-core pictures of her daughter online isn’t such a good idea after it gets them rejected by a reality show, Norris cancels his credit card so Elgort can’t play “Guild Wars” anymore, and Garner freaks out when she finds the one site that Dever had secret (Tumblr), ransacks her room, and drives Elgort to suicide by intercepting his messages to Dever and telling him she’ll block him if he texts again.

It’s all so heavy handed and incredibly cringeworthy in its whole ‘internet bad’ statement, and overuse of bubbles for texts (or sexts), and blocks of chat cluttering up the screen. Yeah, I get that its point is that these things are cluttering up our lives, but with its flashy aesthetics and Voyager imagery, something seems off in its thematic ideal that too much technology is threatening our interactions with other people.

And Thompson’s narration so much recalls her writer role in STRANGER THAN FICTION, that I wanted the characters to yell to the heavens for her to shut up.

The film seems to oddly elaborate on a joke in Woody Allen’s 1977 Oscar winning classic ANNIE HALL in which a flashback has the 9-year old version of Allen’s character Alvy Singer explaining to his physician and mother that “The universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart and that will be the end of everything.” His mother says that because of this, “He’s even stopped doing his homework,” to which the young Alvy replies “What's the point?”

Blending that cosmic comic comment on insignificance with Carl Sagan’s “Tiny Blue Dot,” which both Elgort and Thompson quote in the film, must’ve seemed like a poetic notion to Reitman, but his awful, drawn out, and uninspired execution here makes for an excruciating experience. Come back, Diablo Cody! Everything is forgiven. (YOUNG ADULT, which I was a bit mixed on initially is looking better and better every day).

In its wanting so desperately to be a movie of the moment, as well as an ensemble rom com, MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN is a dreadful mash-up of AMERICAN BEAUTY and CRAZY STUPID LOVE. It’s for sure, the most meaningless and hard to stomach 119 minutes I’ve spent in a theater this year. 

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SAVING MR. BANKS: The Film Babble Blog Review

SAVING MR. BANKS (Dir. John Lee Hancock, 2013)

You don’t have to have had read up on the all the inaccuracies in this fatally fluffy film to see how bogus of a biopic it is. It’s a Disney-fied white-washing of the story behind the making of the classic 1964 musical MARY POPPINS that’s about as convincing as last year’s lackluster HITCHCOCK, another piece of blatant Oscar-bait.

As the film scripted by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith tells it, initially reluctant “Mary Poppins” author P.L. Travers was won over by Walt Disney, whose 1964 adaptation complete with the songs and dancing cartoon penguins she originally objected to, made her cry at the film’s premiere. But it’s well documented that in reality Travers cried at what Disney had done to her character, and she forbade them to ever make a sequel, even expressly stipulating in her will (she died in 1996) that no American can ever adapt her work again.

Those aren’t things you’ll learn in the sugar-coated SAVING MR. BANKS, opening wide today. Emma Thompson portrays P.L. Travers as a prissy no-nonsense party pooper, who only gives in after 20 years of Disney’s pleading to sell the rights to her sacred text because she needs the money. Over the course of two weeks in 1961 Hollywood, Disney, played by Tom Hanks laying on his Tom Hanksian charms as thick as he can, attempts to woo Travers into selling with his MARY POPPINS creative team made up of Bradley Whitford as co-writer Don DaGradi, and Jason Schwartzman and B.J. Novak as the composer/lyricist brother duo of Richard and Robert Sherman.

Thompson’s Travers is plagued with memories of her childhood in Queensland, Australia, mostly consisting of Colin Farrell as her drunken father making a mess of his family’s life. These 1907-set scenes are presented as flashbacks, some fading into the more recent past GODFATHER PART II-style, but many are just cut to and from with little organic sense. Whatever the case they are repetitive and add very little.

Better, but not much, are the Burbank backlot rehearsal room set-pieces. There’s at least some bouncy wit present as when Novak slips the sheet music for “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” out of sight after Thompson’s complaint about the song-writing duo making up words (“‘Responstible’ is not a word!”).

Sure, I get that this is a Disney production that has difficulty even owning up that its beloved head honcho smoked more than an occasional cigarette, but there’s no weight to any of this. Disney is just a man who wants to make a movie for his daughters who love the “Mary Poppins” books, while Travers wants to protect the integrity of her story, with its theme that the famous nanny wasn’t there to save the children; she was there to save the father (Farrell’s father character being the real Mr. Banks). In yet another tiresome flashback we see that Poppins was based on Travers’ stern Aunt Ellie, played by Six Feet Under’s Rachel Griffiths, but that’s a revelation that barely registers. The film’s attempts to draw humor from Thompson sneering at the excesses of the magical kingdom fall flat, while Thomas Newman’s derivative of classic Disney score came nowhere close to pulling on my heartstrings.

On the surface, SAVING MR. BANKS is reasonably polished and well produced, with fine performances by Thompson, Hanks, and the rest of the cast (including the superfluous but still welcome casting of Paul Giamatti as Traver’s chauffeur). It probably won’t get much Academy Award action, but it looks like a Golden Globe getter if there ever was one.

But ultimately it’s a case of sentimental self promotion with very little truth or even truthiness to it. If the real P.L. Travers cried when she saw what was done to her creation, I bet she would’ve walked out on this.

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MEN IN BLACK III: Meh

MEN IN BLACK III (Dir. Barry Sonnenfeld, 2012)

Despite a few good ideas - Josh Brolin cast as a young Tommy Lee Jones; a cameo by SNL’s Bill Hader as Andy Warhol – the third installment of the MEN IN BLACK series is exactly what I expected. Every joke and plot point of this series of CGI-saturated set-pieces is mechanically in place in this standard-issue sequel right off the formulaic franchise assembly-line.

It’s been 10 years since MiBII (and 15 years since MiB), and not much has changed.

Will Smith and partner Jones are still up to their top-secret agency’s alien neutral zone policing, only Rip Torn doesn’t return to play their boss Agent Z. Instead they’ve got Emma Thompson, severly underwritten as Agent O, who figures out that there’s been a fracture in the time-space continuum because Smith came to work craving chocolate milk (that’s right). This is after Smith wakes up in a world in which Jones has been dead for 40 years.

You see, when the evil intergalactic criminal Boris the Animal (Flight of the Conchords’ Jermaine Clement) escaped from a Lunar prision (the film’s big opening scene), he traveled back in time to 1969 (via a time-jump device obtained in a pawn shop) and killed Jones, so Smith has got to go back to the past and save his gruff partner. Then they can save the world from, I dunno, alien jellyfish descending on the planet?

This is where Brolin comes in with a pitch-perfect impersonation of Jones. This central gimmick works well initially (Brolin does Jones so much better than he did Dubya), and helps carry the film from half-chuckle to half-chuckle.

Jones really made out well in this outting - he only has to appear in the beginning and end of the film, but still gets his name above the title while a young hot actor embodies his persona for the rest of the picture.

There are a lot of possibilities for larger-than-life laughs here, such as retro aliens a la late ‘60s sci-fi (think Star Trek and Lost in Space), Clement’s bickering with his younger dumber double, andMichael Stuhlberg (A SERIOUS MAN, Boardwalk Empire) as a quirky visionary alien, but as big as the spectacle gets (and with its Cape Canaveral climax it gets pretty big), the attempts at creating actual comedy are few and futile.

It feels as if the film is so slickly streamlined that any notion of inventive wit would only get in the way. A throwaway one-liner spoutin’ Smith kickin’ extraterrestrial ass is always a surefire summer movie-going audience pleasing scenario, so why mess with success?

Basically, MiBIII isn’t a great movie, but it’s a sturdy franchise entry.

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Giving LAST CHANCE HARVEY A Chance (New DVD Review)

LAST CHANCE HARVEY (Dir. Joel Hopkins, 2008) On Vacation in Las Vegas last month, I picked up a book titled "Best Movies of the 70's" by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Müller at the gift shop at Madame Tussauds. It's a thick book filled with great glossy film stills surrounded by classy scholarly text. Though it's hardly definitive (What, no NETWORK? No MEAN STREETS?) it makes a good case for Dustin Hoffman being the face of 70's cinema. Hard to argue as his mighty run through that decade included the likes of LITTLE BIG MAN, STRAW DOGS, ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, PAPILLON, MARATHON MAN, and STRAIGHT TIME. Lately though, Hoffman hasn't really made much of a dent in moviegoer's memories with family fare like MR. MAGORIUM'S WONDER EMPORIUM or in cruder family fare as Ben Stiller's father Bernie Focker so it would be nice to have the man who was once a major player back in a quality character study drama. LAST CHANCE HARVEY luckily isn't his last chance for this, because while it's a fine cute comic valentine it's still not going to make a dent. However, for those who missed Hoffman's particular brand of quiet charm disguising heartache, it'll do quite nicely for now. "I missed the plane, I lost my job, and my daughter, who's getting married today, decided that she wanted her stepfather, rather than me, to give her away, okay?" Hoffman piles on the pity to Emma Thompson as a customer service airline rep he at first rudely dismissed. He's a jazz pianist turned commercial jingle writer who was told harshly by Richard Schiff (The West Wing) that "there are no more chances". Despite Hoffman's doomed demeanor and Thompson's pithy reluctance their meet-cute morphs into a day of getting to know each other in a sunnier than usual London, BEFORE SUNRISE/SUNSET-wise with a bit of ABOUT SCHMIDT thrown in for good measure - the scenario of the aging sad sack going to his estranged daughter's wedding, that is. Not to say this is anywhere as good as those movies, just that it has a pleasantly familiar framework. Hoffman's ex-wife (Kathy Bates) is happily not a character made for you to hate, but an agreeable yet weathered woman who has long moved on. James Brolin as her husband dressed in a white tuxedo looks like he just suavely stepped out of a James Bond audition but somehow doesn't intimidate Hoffman or make awkward waves in any respect. Nice touches like these and the natural feeling of the banter all make this a movie that breezes by. Hoffman and Thompson effortlessly walk through the rom com plotting with a good sense of the cheekiness involved. LAST CHANCE HARVEY is highly likable, though it wouldn't be missed at a Dustin Hoffman film festival (or a Emma Thompson one either for that matter), it is a nice reminder of the presence and poise of one of the finest actors ever, especially since it looks like he's going to get Focked again. More later...