'Dune: Part II': a stunning epic

 

 Huge in scale, long in the telling (166 minutes). and sporting arcane references from author Frank Herbert's landmark 1965 sci-fi novel, Dune: Part II has arrived. Don’t fret. Director Denis Villeneuve, who released Part One in 2023, delivers a movie with enough visionary heft and action to justify its epic scope.

  I thought Villeneuve's initial effort represented a marked improvement over David Lynch's 1984 sci-fi foray into Duneland, making the most of a drama steeped in intrigue and boasting enough bizarre-looking characters to sustain several otherworldly parade floats.

   More action-oriented than Part One and benefiting from cinematographer Grieg Fraser's stunning desert imagery, Part Two tells a story even non-fans should be able to follow as opposing planets in a vast galactic empire vie for control of melange, a rare spice that serves as an emblem of power.

   In this edition, we spend more time with the Fremen, desert dwellers of Arrakis, the planet where spice is mined and refined and where the heartless Harkonnen have become an occupying force.

    Much of the movie involves efforts by Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) to earn a place among the Fremen. Paul wants to join their fight against the Harkonnen, led by the blubberous Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard).

   Eventually, the Baron unleashes his nephew Feyd-Rautha, a sneering, sadistic villain brought to frighteningly sharp life by Austin Butler.

    Villeneuve keeps a large supporting cast from swamping the various throughlines. A dust-covered Javier Bardem adds humor to his portrayal of Fremen leader Stilgar. Dave Bautista brings bulky menace to the role of Beast Rabban, another Harkonnen sadist, and a subdued Christopher Walken turns up as the emperor who presides over a vast planetary imperium. Josh Brolin returns as Paul's one-time mentor.

    With all that out of the way, let's get to the heart of the movie, provided by Chalomet and Zendaya, who plays the Fremen warrior Chani, a young woman dedicated to ridding the Fremen of oppressive colonial rule. 

     Paul, who earns the Fremen name Usul, and Chani fall in love, allowing the movie to raise questions about Paul’s loyalties. Is he for Fremen freedom or will he use their belief in him to augment his power? Can the aristocratic Paul be trusted by the justifiably suspicious masses?

    Much is made about whether Paul might be the messiah some of  the more fervent Fremen have been awaiting, allowing the movie to touch on additional issues concerning the dangerous ways religious and political aspiration can corrupt each other.

    The stakes may be starkly drawn, but characters are nicely shaded. Rebecca Ferguson returns as Paul's mother, encouraging his ambitious side and sometimes finding herself at odds with her son.

     Part Two thrives on scale, booming set-pieces (a gladiatorial battle with, alas, a crowd that looks CIG-generated), and the summoning of giant sandworms that live beneath the surface of Arrakis and are the source of melange, the spice with near-miraculous powers.

       For all its intricacies, betrayals, and plotting, the story retains its thematic resonance. What moral prices must be paid to control the spice.

      Now, after almost six hours of movie, Dune isn't finished. Questions remain for Paul, Chani, and the entire empire. Expect Part Three. I find that a bit dispiriting. If a story can't be told in six hours, maybe it's a miniseries.

      But the world of Dune remains intriguingly complex, full of characters whose roles shift and evolve. Credit Villeneuve with filling the screen with enough exotic flavor and bold action to keep Dune vividly alive through two helpings. 

      There's no reason to think he couldn't do the same in a third.

A whimsical (heaven help us) romcom

 

     Writer/director John Patrick Shanley's new movie -- Wild Mountain Thyme -- takes place in Ireland where Emily Blunt and Jamie Dornan star as a couple of farmers who've known each other all their lives. 

     Their families own adjacent farms, but Blunt's mother (Dearbhla Molloy) refuses to sell a strip of land to Dornan's father Tony (Christopher Walken). 

  Although this squabble over land creates mild tension, the bulk of the movie involves the halting relationship between Blunt's Rosemary and Dornan's Anthony. 

    The savvy Rosemary understands that they're supposed to be together. Preternatural shyness keeps Anthony from popping the question. 

    Shanley sets us up for a flavorful romcom, but whimsy, romance, and occasional splashes of rue aren't enough to give this adaptation of a Shanley stage play (Outside Mullingar) new life. 

   Trailers for Wild Mountain Thyme riled the Irish press. The movie was mocked for cliched Irish accents that seemed tailored for characters who felt as if they'd been drawn from fantasy. 

    Fair enough and casting Walken as an Irish father with a highly variable accent doesn't help.

    American audiences, who may not be quite so unhinged by the accents, will find an otherwise slender movie in which Blunt gives the stand-out performance.

     Frank and cynical, Rosemary knows what she wants. She doesn't need to be romanced. She's eager to arrive at the destination. Reticent but not lacking in self-insight, Dornan's Anthony doesn't make for the most interesting counterpoint to Rosemary's determination.

     The arrival of an American cousin (a bland Jon Hamm) threatens the already tenuous relationship between Rosemary and Anthony.     

    Scenes that are intended to be funny (Anthony practicing his proposal speech by kneeling before a donkey) don't quite work  and Shanley's effort to preserve the play's darker currents don't really pay off. Rain soaks several scenes and an early encounter involving Walken and Molloy is steeped in talk of death.

     Shanley gives the characters a wary sense of skepticism, but  for all its trying, Wild Mountain Thyme doesn't stir the heart. 

     Shanley, who wrote and directed Doubt (2008), also wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Moonstruck (1987), a charmer that was directed by Norman Jewison. Those were two strong movies, but this time, attempts at quirky authenticity feel strained.

     Weird, no? In Wild Mountain Thyme, what must have been intended as idiosyncratic and flavorful too often feels stereotypical.

      

Bob‘s Cinema Diary: 10/9/20 — My movie week beginning with ‘The War With Grandpa’

       For various reasons — not all related to the national news — the week of Oct. 5  began in depressing fashion. Yes, Trump treated a virus that has killed more than 210,000 Americans as an excuse for demonstrating image-stoking bravado. Yes, I finished the novel Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar and felt a touch of loneliness for the company of its narrator, a Muslim steeped in the contradictions of being an American whose family hailed from Pakistan. And, yes, the sustained ugliness of public life continues to be inescapable.

     There's more. The 2020 edition of the Denver Film Festival looms, but — unlike in previous years — I won’t be seeing old friends because most of the festival is taking place virtually, as it should. 

    And then there’s the chaos related to release-upon-release of movies that make me to wonder how much the barrage of streaming opportunities and limited theatrical possibilities matter to anyone. To keep up, The New York Times employs a battery of reviewers, many contributing short reviews. Last week, I reviewed  seven movies and couldn’t help but wonder whether there was a Prufrockian quality to it all, measuring life in tiny increments, movies that come and go.

And then there’s the movies themselves. So, a few words about what I watched this week.

War with Grandpa
opens this week; call it an intergenerational comedy starring Robert De Niro with featured appearances by Christopher Walken and Cheech Marin. De Niro, of course, is no stranger to low-grade comedies, having made all manner of them, many quite popular: the Meet the Parents series, Analyze This among those that have been successful at the box office.

   It's difficult for some of us who honed our movie taste in the 1970s not to see these cinematic cash registers as betrayals or maybe they should be taken as warnings. Perhaps we were wrong to invest so much hope in actors we thought were redefining performance and, in the process, changing movies themselves.

    You know the names: De Niro, Pacino, Hoffman, and more.

     So here’s War With Grandpa, a movie that has no particular reason for being other than to follow its formula. 

    De Niro plays Ed,  a widower who moves in with the family of his married daughter (Uma Thurman) because he’s no longer able to live independently — a move that never feels unconvincing because Ed hardly seems physically or mentally incompetent.

    To adjust to Ed's presence, the host family awards him the bedroom occupied by the family’s son Peter (Oakes Egley). Two sister siblings (Laura Morano and Poppy Gagnon) play less of a role. Besieged and displaced, Peter is forced to move into the attic, which is rundown in the way that you might expect an attic in a movie to be rundown. Birds fly in. A mouse roams freely. 

  I’m thinking Mom and Dad (Rob Riggle) might be candidates for abuse charges. Aren’t they supposed to make sure that the kid’s quarters amount to something more than a place to stow familial overflow?

    The movie’s title tells you most of what you need to know. Egged on by generic-looking middle-school classmates, young Peter declares war on grandpa for having invaded his territory. 

    When reason fails, grandpa decides to fight back.

    One of the major laugh scenes involves grandpa awkwardly trying to keep his balance as he slips on a stream of marbles that have been unleashed beneath him. His fall would decommission most grandpas, but we're supposed to excuse such assaults in the name of physical comedy.

     Did I mention the very large snake Peter puts in grandpa's bed?

    Director Tim Hill (The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie)  stocks the movie with more such shenanigans as he follows the blueprint that will lead to the ultimate battle, which takes place at the birthday celebration of the family’s youngest daughter, who happens to have been born on Christmas Eve. 

   At this point, the destruction rises to epic levels with Hill trying to wring new levels from what feels like spare parts from other movies.

    I would have enjoyed seeing more of Walken and Marin, particularly Walken, who plays Ed's friend Jerry, an aging man who fills his home with toys that, one supposes, are meant to divert him from the reality of any approaching infirmities: a One-Wheel board challenges Jerry’s balance and affords him an opportunity to fall on his ass, too.

    Enough of this. I’m sure you get the idea. I leave it to you to decide whether you wish to venture into the theatrical world during a pandemic to see The War With Grandpa. 

    So what else? Well, how about From the Vine?

   Director Sean Cisterna is so determined to charm us with scenery that From the Vine plays like the cinematic equivalent of a travel brochure. And that, for me, was the best part. The setting: Acerenza, a medieval hilltop town south of Naples.

    The story centers on the Italian-born Marco (Joe Pantoliano), a businessman who runs a small American automobile manufacturing company. Disgruntled by his board's refusal to acknowledge environmental concerns, Marco quits, moves to Italy against his wife's wishes, occupies his late grandfather's spacious house, and decides to enter the wine businesses. 

    Craftsmanship and hands-on labor will replace the brutalizing abstractions of corporate life -- or so the fantasy goes. No troublesome construction problems emerge, as they did in Under the Tuscan Sun. The residence that belonged to Marco's grandfather needs little by way of reclamation. It’s Marco's spirit that undergoes renovation.

     Adapted from a novel by Kenneth Canio Cancellara, the screenplay adds an array of dutifully colorful characters.

     These include the local policeman (Marco Leonardi) and a disheveled squatter (Tony Nappo) who has taken up residence on Marco's land. Conveniently, Nappo's Enzo used to work  for a company that produces special oak barrels in which fine wines can be aged. This will come in handy later. 

     The property's caretaker (Toni Nardi) fills out the roster of characters; he’s a  wine expert who eventually agrees to help Marco realize his dream.

    To make matters even better, Marco's dream neatly intersects with the town's revival. A restored vineyard will cure the town’s  unemployment and perhaps even stem the flight of the village's young people. 

    Eventually, Marco's wife (Wendy Crewson) and his grown daughter (Paula Brancati)  travel to Italy. They plan to drag Marco back to the US to resume the life he's sworn off. But Marco is too busy having flashbacks to his youth or listening to the leaves on the olive trees talk to him, an occurrence visualized with help of an animated effect.

    Only the most naive of viewers possibly could believe that the movie will have an ending that does anything but confirm the validity of its fantasies. 

    If you enjoy movies in which the major feature is mildly expressed niceness, From the Vine may prove pleasing and, yes, there’s all that scenery, idealized to the max, as is everything else in this Italo-escapist massage of a movie.

Anything else?

Well, yes, My Name is Pedro, a documentary that plunges headlong into many fractious issues. Director Lillian LaSalle tells the story of Pedro Santana, a dedicated educator who has worked as a teacher, a principal, and an assistant school superintendent. The heart of the story takes place after Santana moves from the Bronx to the East Ramapo school district outside New York City. The community Santana inherits is beset by problems. Hasidic Jews, who don't send their kids to public schools, compose three-quarters of the district's population.

    To further complicate matters, the Hasidic Jews also constitute the majority of the school board and, according to the movie, are  intent on reducing funding for the community’s multi-racial educational institutions, channeling the funds into the religious schools they favor.

   Santana turns out to be one of those people with a personality so large, it can’t be contained by institutional boundaries, an innovative teacher whose concern for kids seems undeniable.   

    He wants them to succeed. He’s imaginative when it comes to designing curriculum. He sports a wild crop of hair that must be taken as a statement, something he wants people to notice. Wherever he goes, he's an undeniable presence.  

     Santana’s personal story intrigues, but the community he serves reflects the tensions that often arise when various ethnicities try to navigate the same choppy waters.

    If you’re unfamiliar with Santana’s life, I won’t tell you more. I will, however, say that a generally inspirational story isn't without complications and setbacks, including a certification scandal that ostensibly wound up costing Santana his job. 

     LaSalle left me with a few questions that I thought she might have answered, but in its overall parameters, My Name Is Pedro, qualifies as an important cinematic document with plenty of live-wire urgency.

   As that’s my movie week.  And now, if you'll excuse me, I'll return to my state of low-level depression, a curtain that closes shortly after I stop writing. I’ll be peeking out again soon.

    

Disney scores with another 'Jungle Book'

CGI animals and a strong voice cast help director Jon Favreau sell a familiar tale.

Adaptations of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book don't exactly make for fresh news. So when I first saw the title on a list of 2016 releases, I found it difficult to get excited about another jungle journey, even one equipped with a CGI menagerie.

As it turns out, Disney's Jungle Book, directed by Jon Favreau, is bright (even in 3D), appealing and in at least one inspired sequence, engagingly loopy.

The story focuses on Mowgli (Neel Sethi), a boy who was raised by wolves and suddenly finds himself targeted by a tiger named Shere Kahn (voiced by Idris Elba).

The story is narrated by Bagheera (Ben Kingsley), the sagacious panther who first brought young Mowgli to Raksha (Lupita Nyong'o), the wolf who becomes his surrogate mother and who tries to instill him with the lore of the pack.

Elba gives voice to a convincing villain, a somewhat battered tiger who's motivated by a desire to keep fire out of the jungle. Shere Khan thinks it's not enough to exile Mowgli from the jungle by returning him to his human tribe. He wants to kill the boy.

In the early going, I half wondered whether Mowgli's flight through the jungle hadn't given Disney an excuse to produce a kiddie version of The Revenant, another wilderness survival epic. But Favreau balances the movie's convincingly dangerous situations with enough comic moments to keep fright in check.

To insure the success of its effort, Disney has surrounded first-timer Sethi with a strong voice cast. In addition to Kinglsey and Elba, you'll recognize Bill Murray as the voice of the conniving but good-spirited Baloo, a bear with a honey jones.

The movie even breaks into song with a Murray-voiced rendition of The Bare Necessities, which was used in Disney's 1967 animated version of The Jungle Book. The song seems awkwardly inserted because this version of Jungle Book isn't really a musical, but once you get past its slightly jarring arrival, the song is sort of fun.

Even though we never see him, Christopher Walken does scene-stealing work as the voice of King Louie, a giant orangutan with evil on his mind.

Louie wants Mowglie -- referred to by the animals as a "man cub" -- to return to his own kind, capture fire and deliver it to the power-hungry king who lives in an impressively created temple that has been overrun by all manner of monkeys.

Walken, too, is given a musical number, I Wanna Be Like You.

Animal purists may find this entirely anthropomorphic endeavor to be a little prone to cuteness. Despite Favreau's amazingly skillful use of CGI, the movie's spirit often follows a cartoon template with creatures (wolf cubs, for example) that are petting-zoo cuddly.

Although the movie expresses deep reverence for elephants -- all creatures bow before them -- it also makes sure to find a way to put a baby elephant into danger, an incident that provides the movie with an opportunity to showcase the human ingenuity that Mowgli possesses.

But there are also strangely alluring creatures that aren't quite as kid friendly: Ka, a giant snake voiced by Scarlett Johansson, tries to tempt Mowgli with her hypnotically seductive voice.

Favreau paces the movie at a speed that tends to help push criticism aside. Panthers with British accents? Why is it that some of the animals talk and some don't? And, most importantly, concerns about whether some of the realistically presented animal fights are too vivid for the youngest viewers to handle. The movie has been rated PG.

Overall, though, The Jungle Book proves entertaining and likable without delivering too heavy-handed a message about the way humans, the masters of fire, tend to destroy jungle habitats.

Stay put for the end credits, which are entertaining in their own right.

Eastwood slows down 'Jersey Boys'

The popular musical about Fankie Valli and The Four Seasons reaches the screen

You can look at director Clint Eastwood's version of Jersey Boys in a couple of ways. You can lament the fact that Eastwood's movie misses some of the irrepressible energy that marked the musical's many stage productions.

Looked at another way, it's possible to argue that Eastwood -- not the most likely choice to bring a popular musical to the screen -- does a workman-like job of balancing drama, comedy and musical numbers in telling the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, the '60s group responsible for such hits as Sherry, Big Girls Don't Cry, Dawn, Walk Like a Man and many more.

For a reviewer, it's frustrating to acknowledge that there's legitimacy in both points of view, but I've seen the stage version and appreciated the fact that Eastwood isn't interested in building his movie around in-your-face energy.

Eastwood begins with the backstory of how the group formed and how Valli -- actually Francesco Castelluccio -- came to provide its signature voice, a famous falsetto that helped create the Four Seasons' trademark sound.

Jersey Boys works as a typical rise-and-fall story: The group struggles, becomes phenomenally successful and eventually falls apart amid arguments over money and control.

John Lloyd Young, the actor who originated the role on Broadway, plays Valli, a kid from Belleville, N.J. who is portrayed as never having mastered the ruthless side of the music business. Throughout, Frankie remains faithful to a romanticized Jersey ethos of loyalty, friendship and neighborhood ties, even when his values cost him dearly.

The movie also introduces us to Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen), a young man who already had written a hit song (Short Shorts) when he joined the Four Seasons and who wrote most of the songs that put the group on the map.

Vincent Piazza portrays Tommy DeVito, the guy who formed the group and who also squandered a lot of its money. Michael Lomenda plays bassist Nick Massi, who mostly seems content to hover in the background.

The story makes room for other characters, as well. Christopher Walken appears as Angelo "Gyp" DeCarlo, a mobster who takes a liking to Frankie. Mike Doyle plays Bob Crewe, a gay record producer who helped put the Seasons on the map and who, in many scenes, provides comic relief. He's from Jersey, but functions as the movie's anti-Jersey Boy. And Joseph Russo plays Joe Pesci, the edgy actor who, in his early years, introduced Gaudio to the group.

An almost charming Walken provides the glue that holds a pivotal scene together. Somehow, the group must deal with the fact that Tommy owes $162,000 to a loan shark. Gyp negotiates the deal that saves Tommy's life.

Eastwood takes an unhurried approach to the screenplay by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, who also wrote the book for the musical. He follows the basic format of the play, which finds each character narrating segments of the movie in what appears to be an effort to add Rashamon-like complexity to a story that really doesn't really need it.

The portrayal of the movie's Italian-American milieu dips into caricature that doesn't really let up until the latter going, when Valli begins to face a host of personal and career problems.

Perhaps because he was looking for a way to make the material his own, Eastwood brings an element of wistful reflection to a story that's usually presented in more upbeat fashion.

Eastwood may have made a mistake in not doing more to showcase the musical numbers, the main reason anyone would want to sit through a story about these four New Jersey guys.

There are other miscalculations, as well. When Valli sings My Eyes Adored You as a lullaby to his young daughter, the moment feels weird: The lovelorn lyrics ("Though I never laid a hand on you") don't match the tender fatherly sentiment for which Eastwood must have been aiming.

The main tension involves Tommy's reluctance to admit that he's not in control of the group. He can't acknowledge that without Valli and Gaudio, there really is no group. A volatile Piazza plays Tommy as if he's in a perpetual audition for a small part in Goodfellas.

I wouldn't say that Young has the makings of a terrific screen actor. He doesn't have the kind of face that turns close-ups into intriguing explorations of character. But Eastwood needed someone who could replicate Valli's voice and Young obviously knows how to do that. The songs weren't lip-synched, but were recorded live.

By the end, it finally becomes clear what Eastwood found admirable about the Four Seasons, the clarity of their tone when they were just four guys harmonizing under a lamp post in a Newark suburb. It's a long time coming, but Eastwood gets there.

Major actors, minor movie

No movie starring Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin can be all bad -- and Stand Up Guys isn't.

Putting Christopher Walken, Al Pacino and Alan Arkin into the same movie raises a large amount of justifiable expectation. None of these veterans have worked together before, and it's reasonable to assume that the cumulative weight of their old-pro experience will deliver the big-screen goods.

Unfortunately, Stand Up Guys -- the story of aging mobsters forced to come to grips with their mortality -- only partially lives up to the promise suggested by its powerhouse cast.

As directed by Fisher Stevens, from a script by Noah Haidle, Stand Up Guys finds its best moments in the relationship between Pacino and Walken, as a couple of bottom-feeding hoods who inhabit the lower echelons of the criminal subculture.

Walken's Doc, who spends most of his time painting pictures of sunrises, refers to himself as a "retired" man. He lives in a modest apartment. His hell-raising days appear to be done. He's proud of the fact that he has cable. Hey, at a certain point, you take your pleasures where you find them.

A low-key drama begins when Pacino's Val (short for Valentine) is released from a 28-year stretch in prison. Val's the movie's most "stand-up" guy because he served his time without ratting out any of his cronies.

Walken's Doc meets Val upon his release. The two hug awkwardly, and the movie proceeds to chart the next 24 or so hours in the lives of these aging felons.

Looking to party after his long prison stint, Val visits a local brothel, only to discover that he's unable to function sexually. Doc proposes a Viagra solution -- which leads the two to break into a pharmacy.

Val has his "party," but even that has its downside. Having consumed too much Viagra, Val winds up at a hospital, where we meet a nurse (Julianna Margulies), who happens to be the daughter of another of their old partners in crime, a getaway driver named Hirsch.(Yes, the script definitely could have done without another joke about a guy whose erection lasts more than four hours.)

Hirsch, we learn, is languishing in a nursing home where he's suffering from emphysema.

To add some proverbial insult to the injury of age-related decline, a vicious mob boss known as Claphands (Mark Margolis)wants Val assassinated. The screenplay eventually gets around to telling us why Val has become a target, while making room for Val and Doc to rescue Arkin's Hirsch from the nursing home where he's pretty much relegated to sitting in his room.

Arkin's Hirsch gets an opportunity to ply his trade as the trio races from the cops and lands in a variety of other jams, not the least of which involves a naked woman (Vanessa Ferlito) they discover in the trunk of the car they've stolen. They become the woman's self-appointed protectors.

They also visit Doc's favorite restaurant where they're waited on by Doc's favorite waitress (Addison Timlin).

I wouldn't say that either Walken or Pacino is in peak form, but they work work well enough together -- with Walken playing the more restrained of the former hoodlums. Walken and Pacino keep the movie watchable, even though the story -- punctuated with well-selected '70s R&B -- doesn't generate much tension.

If you're inclined to think about what might have been accomplished with this kind of cast, Stand Up Guys may prove disappointing. If you're willing to settle for watching Pacino and Walken enact a bromance for seniors, you may be entertained enough to stave off regret. I was.

A few words with Fisher Stevens

Talk about a dream cast. To make Stand Up Guys, Fisher Stevens was able to cast Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin in principal roles. Each of them plays an aging gangster at a point in life when mortality no longer seems like a distant threat. In an on-line chat with critics, the 49-year-old Stevens, who has acted in more than 85 projects and who has directed three features, talked about his movie, which is just now opening around the country.

Q: Were there any differences in how you approached the job of directing Pacino and Walken??
Stevens: Before we started shooting, I knew Al much better than Chris. I spent a bit more time going over the script at the beginning with him, so I felt more at ease directing Al at first. With Chris, I had to feel my way around at the beginning. But they both welcomed direction. Sometimes they would disagree with me, but ultimately, they would always try one take the way I wanted it.

Q: How difficult was it for you to get Walken and Pacino to agree to the roles each plays? Pacino's Val, a guy who just has been released from jail, is a bit more of a loose cannon than Walken's Doc, an aging gangster who seems to have done a better job coming to grips with his age.

Stevens: When I started the movie, Al and Chris told me that they had done a reading a few years earlier of a different version of the script. Al played Doc, Chris Played Val. When I called Chris to say I was directing the film, he expressed interest in playing Doc. He said that as he gets older, he enjoys playing grandfathers.
I went in a round-about way to try and get someone to play opposite Chris, not going to my friend Al Pacino, because I was told he wasn’t interested. I kept striking out until my phone rang one day. It was Al calling me after he had seen a Woody Allen documentary I had executive produced. He asked me to work on a documentary with him. I said, 'No, I want you to read Stand Up Guys again and consider being in it with me directing.' There was a long pause, and Al said, 'You’re directing?' I said, 'Yeah.' He read the screenplay, and said, 'Of course.' Four weeks later we were in pre-production.

Q: How did you decide on who would play Hirsch, the former crony and getaway driver who Doc and Val rescue from an old-age home?
Fisher: The first person I thought of for Hirsch was Alan Arkin. I had worked with him in the film Four Days in September 20 years ago. I guess because Chris and Al were already attached to the film, it peaked Arkin’s interest. Thank God he said yes. It was like a dream come true.

Q: Stand Up Guys is set in the present, but has the feel of an older film. What, if any, films were primary inspirations for Stand Up Guys?
Fisher: Many films from the 1970s including Dog Day Afternoon, Five Easy Pieces, Straight Time, and The Dirty Dozen. I loved the films of the '70s because they were about characters and not so much about big plot points and big set pieces. I made sure there were no cell phones, no computers, nothing very modern in Stand Up Guys except for the car that Pacino steals. Most of the clothes were vintage. The colors were muted. It was like time had forgotten this town and these people.

Q. Can you say a bit more about your approach to material that's both comic and serious?
Fisher: It was important to ground this entire script in reality. That was the only way for it to work. We rehearsed and had long discussions about keeping everything real, even when it comes to hyper-blown situations. Fortunately, I had the greatest actors in the world to work with, and they only know how to do things real. When it felt false, we did another take...It was incredible fun. Sometimes I would get lost just watching them act, and forget I was directing. It was also a lot of work, but I would gladly do it again.

Precise music, sloppy lives

A great cast does its best to elevate A Late Quartet.

Sometimes I wonder if even Christopher Walken knows where his line readings are headed? Walken, of course, has acquired the reputation of being an actor who specializes in characters who challenge expectation and defy most ideas of normality. But not always. A Late Quartet, a movie about a string quartet that faces a major crisis, provides welcome proof that Walken is not only a highly capable actor, but an extremely sympathetic one. The movie takes the burden of weirdness off Walken's shoulders, something that should come as a relief to both the actor and his audience..

Walken plays Peter Mitchell, the group's cellist and elder statesman. When Peter tells the other members of the unimaginatively named quartet -- The Fugue -- that he has been diagnosed with Parkinson's, troubles begin to threaten the group's 25-year history.

Conflicts quickly arise among the musicians: two of whom (Philip Seymour Hoffman -- as the second violinist -- and Catherine Keener -- as the violist) enter a shaky period in their marriage. To add further complication, professional jealousy starts to poison the atmosphere: The second violinist thinks it's time for him to change places with the first violinist (Mark Ivanar.)

You can tell from a quick perusal of the bold-faced names in the preceding paragraph that A Late Quartet boasts a terrific cast, all of whom are in expectedly fine form.

It's hardly surprising that Hoffman, most recently seen in The Master, gives a strong performance as Robert Gelbart, a husband who believes that his wife, Juliette, is not supporting his quest to play first violin. He's also in conflict with Ivanar's character over the quartet's approach to music, which very much has been determined by the first violinist's highly controlled personality and his preference for technical mastery over free-flowing passion.

The story needed no further wrinkles, but the screenplay has Ivanar's character giving violin lessons to Alexandra (Imogen Poots), daughter of Robert and Juliette. Alexandra harbors a good deal of resentment toward her parents, another dynamic in what turns out to be a script that tries to hit a few too many melodramatic notes.

Director Yaron Zilberman builds the movie around all of these personal tensions, as well as around the group's efforts to master Beethoven's challenging Opus 131.

I know a musician who remained unconvinced (perhaps even bothered) by the fake playing that this talented quartet of actors must attempt. But there's no faulting the cast for the way it inhabits each character.

Hoffman captures Robert's restlessness, volatility and disappointment; Keener excels as a woman who too often has been called upon to become a stabilizing influence on the group; Walken brings a sad sense of resolve to the role of a recently widowed man who's about to lose the skill that has carried him through life. Less well-known than the others, Ivanar more than holds his own.

Zilberman's approach to the material is fairly straightforward, but the screenplay he co-wrote with Seth Grossman, isn't always sure-handed. The story comes dangerously close to farce as the result of an affair that Poots's Alexandra initiates with Ivanar's character.

If you're looking for deep insight into chamber music, you may be a bit disappointed, but the notion that disciplined classical musicians can lead particularly sloppy lives is not without interest, and a screenplay would have to have been awfully bad to defeat a quartet of actors this good.

One psychopath too many?

A movie that criticizes itself as it goes along, but is most notable for its wild performances.

Generally speaking, one psychopath should be enough for any movie. That rule, however, doesn't apply if you're writer/director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges) and you're determined to make movie devoted to the principle that nothing succeeds like excess.

To say that Seven Psychopaths is over-plotted misses the point because the point is a ton of over-plotting that propels a large cast of characters through one wild scenario after another.

To keep the movie percolating, McDonagh has hired an ace cast of oddball actors: Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson and Christopher Walken, all of whom have plenty of offbeat credibility.

The result is a Los Angeles-based movie that hums along, dropping in stories within stories, tying them all together in scenes that take place in the desert and find the characters debating over how to conduct a proper gun battle.

Farrell plays Marty, a screenwriter who has a title for movie -- Seven Psychopaths -- but no story to go with it. His pal Billy (Rockwell) seems to know a good deal about psychopathy and offers to help.

As it turns out, Billy runs a dog-stealing racket with his buddy Hans (Walken), a strangely philosophical fellow whose wife (Linda Bright Clay) has been hospitalized for cancer.

Harrelson enters the story as a mobster whose dog -- a Shih Tzu named Bonny -- has been stolen by Billy.

The screenplay makes room for appearances by Harry Dean Stanton (as a Quaker who's trying to avenge his daughter's death); Long Nguyen (as a Vietcong veteran seeking revenge for the May Lai massacre), and Tom Waits (as a guy who -- along with his girlfriend -- played by Amanda Warren -- sets out to eliminate as many serial killers as possible). Did I mention that Waits appears in almost all of his scenes carrying a bunny?

True to its hip nature, the movie contains dollops of self-criticism. At one point, Hans complains about the the way women tend to be shortchanged in these kinds of movies. Too bad he's right because one of these women is Abbie Cornish, who plays the girlfriend who junks Marty early in the film. Gabourey Sidibe (familiar from Precious) has a cameo as a woman Harrelson's character tries to blame for losing his dog.

For once, it's not Walken who gives the movie's most outrageous performance. That honor goes to Rockwell, who's playing a wacked-out guy with enough lose screws to fill ten trash pails. That's not to say that Waken doesn't quietly walk off with his share of scenes, probably because he's smart enough not to try to out-wacko Rockwell.

Seven Psychopaths is fun -- until it isn't, and it requires a high tolerance for self-conscious writing, for performances that try a bit too hard to be outlandish and for the kind of movie-mad post-modernism that makes its hipness as difficult to ignore as a loud tie.

McDonagh's movie can be seen as a satirical take on violent genre movies, as a violent genre movie or as a movie that, in its best moments, makes you laugh in spite of yourself.

An Irish tough guy takes on the mob

A worthy addition to a reliable genre..

Every now again, a movie takes us by surprise. That’s what happened to me with Kill the Irishman, a welcome addition to the expansive gallery of gangster movies, perhaps our grittiest and most consistently rewarding genre. In addition to having some fire in its belly, Irishman has the added benefit of being based on the true story of a bomb-riddled crime wave that swept Cleveland in the mid-1970s.

A tough Irishman named Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson) provides the focus for a drama that pits him and several cohorts against Cleveland's reigning Mafia bosses. At stake: the city’s criminal largess – and a certain, twisted sense of ethnic pride.

Danny, a rough-and-tumble kid who starred on his high school’s basketball team, begins his career working on the Cleveland waterfront. He muscles his way to the top of the longshoreman’s union. Corruption – payoffs and various other forms of larceny – afford Danny a taste of the good life. He relishes it – until the cops close in on him.

After cutting a deal to avoid prosecution, Danny pursues a less organized life of crime with director Jonathan Hensleigh and cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub giving dangerous, gritty life to this tumultuous period of Cleveland’s history.

At first, I wasn’t sure about Stevenson’s performance; it seemed a little flat. An Irish-born actor who has spent most of his life in England, Stevenson keeps the histrionics to a minimum, sometimes relying on sheer physical bulk to convey Greene’s bravado and menace, but as the movie progresses, Stevenson becomes increasingly credible. His Danny is as tough as a calloused fist.

A thug who’s not afraid to be caught reading a book, Greene never shrinks from a fight, takes no crap from anyone and seems to have made a major life decision early: In a brutal world, no one was going to push him around. Wisely, Stevenson never quite settles the question of whether we should abhor Danny or admire his grit.

Hensleigh surrounds Stevenson with a large, capable cast. A beefy Val Kilmer plays a cop who grew up with Danny, and has followed his exploits. Vincent D’Onofrio portrays a Mafia guy. Passed over for a promotion, D’Onofrio’s John Nardi forms an alliance with Danny, offering proof of his undying friendship in one of the movie’s most chilling scenes.

These days, no gangster film can call itself complete unless Christopher Walken makes an appearance. Here, Walken plays Shondor Birns, a Jewish restaurateur who’s more interested in crime than cuisine. Tony Lo Bianco signs on as Jack Licavoli, head of the Italian mob in Cleveland. Paul Sorvino does cameo duty as a New York mobster.

I can’t say that Kill the Irishman breaks a lot of new ground, but it does a hell of a job digging up old soil, and it even throws in a bit of Irish romanticism for good measure. In an attempt to present Danny as something more than a mean-spirited thug, we’re given a scene that anoints him as a bona fide Celtic warrior, the noble descendant of a breed of hard-drinking, hard-fighting men who may not have known how to rule the world, but weren’t about to let it rule them.

That may be blarney, but Kill the Irishman delivers the gangster goods, earning its place among a variety of small films that pack some wallop.

One more thing: You'll see so many car-bomb explosions in Kill The Irishman that when you leave the theater, you may be tempted to take a good look under your car before you start it. Hey, you can't be too careful.