Bob's Cinema Diary: 8/7/20 -- 'Made in Italy' and 'The Secret: Dare to Dream'

Made in Italy

        The last thing I want from a film is to have my heart warmed. 

     So, I was put off by the generic description I read of

Made in Italy, a movie starring Liam Neeson and his son, Micheal Richardson. But then I thought, "Hey, give it a chance. Neeson never has been an actor whose work is driven by sentiment.”

     In Made in Italy, Neeson delivers a respectable performance but even he can’t save the film from becoming a predictable exercise in "feel-goodism" -- supposedly tempered by the emotional undertow of a man who lost his wife in an automobile accident and a grown son who’s estranged from his father.

       Director James D’Arcy, who also wrote the screenplay, makes his feature debut with a story that’s smart enough to leave London, where Richardson's Jake runs an art gallery and where Neeson’s Robert has been stewing for a couple of decades. Destination: Tuscany. 

        As it turns out, Robert owns a run-down house in the Tuscan hills. Jack wants to sell the house so that he can buy the gallery he loves from his estranged wife. Her family wants to sell it out from under her soon-to-be ex-husband.

        Once in Italy, the movie turns into a variant of Under the Tuscan Sun, a story of a renovation that’s fated to bring about a father-and-son reconciliation and which proceeds with considerably less difficulty than Diane Lane faced in the 2003 version of Frances Mayes' bestselling book,  more engaging than either movie.

         While in Tuscany, Robert must rediscover the talent he’s abandoned, although the artwork shown in the movie suggests he might have done well to stay away from an easel. 
          You don’t need to have seen many movies to know that Jack eventually will fall under Tuscany’s charms.

          Valeria Biello appears so that she can put an exclamation point on Jack’s transformation. She portrays Natalia, a beautiful woman who runs the restaurant in the small town near Robert’s property. A local realtor (Lindsay Duncan) helps look for buyers.

          D’Arcy tries to put weight into the proceedings in a scene in which Robert and Jack finally have the confrontation we've know is coming all along.

          Tuscan scenery can cover many sins when it comes to movies, but Made in Italy didn’t warm my heart. A couple of times, it made it sink, though.

The Secret: Dare to Dream

          

When it comes to movies that want to make you feel better about the world, The Secret: Dare to Dream makes Made in Italy look like something Eugene O’Neill might have written.

          Katie Holmes and Josh Lucas star in a movie based on a self-help book, Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. Holmes plays a single mom who’s struggling to make ends meet. Lucas shows up as the kind of super dude who in most movies would turn out to be a serial killer.

          But in The Secret, Lucas’ Bray really is a nice guy and Holmes’ Miranda is more than ready to break down her emotional resistance after being widowed. 

        Predictable and seldom credible, you’d expect to be able to watch a movie such as The Secret without working up too much animosity, but director Andy Tenant (Sweet Home Alabama) lets the movie dribble on for a patience-taxing 107 minutes, sticking so close to the surface you wonder whether someone should have suggested looking up the word “subtext.”

      The inevitable romance between Bray and Miranda is punctuated by Bray’s tendency to offer bromides that amount to various restatements of one idea: even terrible things are fraught with opportunity. He talks about the law of attraction, meaning that we attract the world we live in with our thoughts: Think positive and the outcome will be positive.

    Set around New Orleans, The Secret centers on Bray’s attempts to help Katie recover when a storm sends a tree through the roof of her home. 

     Miranda has three children (Sarah Hoffmeister, Aidan Pierce Brennan, and Chloe Lee) and a mother-in-law (Celia Weston) with whom she seems to get along.

     Aside from the fact that the tree that falls into the house looks real, nothing about The Secret can overcome the fact that the movie aims to spark a romance that’s as tepid as nearly everything else that precedes it.

          

A caper movie, country style

Director Steven Soderbergh has fun with Lucky Logan, a heist movie set in West Virginia.

It's a bit of a stretch to think that anyone has been eagerly waiting to see Daniel Craig, the current James Bond, play a hillbilly safecracker from West Virginia. But Craig does just that in Steven Soderbergh's Logan Lucky, a caper movie in which a group of West Virginia rednecks stage a robbery at the Charlotte Motor Speedway during the Coca-Cola 600, a NASCAR race held on Memorial Day weekend.

Those who try to mine veins of importance from Logan Lucky, which was written by Rebecca Blunt, may find themselves straining. Logan Lucky stands as an enjoyable -- if slight -- caper comedy build around odd ball casting that creates much of the movie's appeal -- that and Soderbergh's understanding of how to freshen a formula.

An unlikely duo of Channing Tatum and Adam Driver play brothers. Tatum's Jimmy Logan is a beleaguered construction worker who loses his job for not reporting a pre-existing health condition; he has a limp. Jimmy's brother Clyde (Driver) works as a bartender despite having a prosthetic lower left arm, a souvenir from his military service in Iraq.

Jimmy would like to spend more time with his daughter after his divorce from Bobbie Jo (Katie Holmes). But Bobbie Joe and her husband (David Denman) plan to move to a swankier town, leaving Jimmy with a great need for money if he wants to maintain a relationship with his daughter (Farrah Mackenzie), a child who participates in beauty pageants.

With no legitimate prospects in sight, Jimmy uses the code word that his brother knows signals trouble. "Cauliflower."

The rest of the movie follows a pleasingly predictable pattern in which Jimmy assembles the crew he needs to pull off the heist. One of Jimmy's primary partners in crime is Joey Bang (Craig), a felon whose participation presents Jimmy with an obstacle. Joey's in jail. Jimmy contrives a scheme to get Joey out of the slammer so that he can put his larcenous plan in motion.

Jimmy's sister (Riley Keough) plays a role in pulling off a robbery that allows Soderbergh to revel in West Virginia color, sometimes in ways that seem a trifle self-conscious.

To further complicate matters, Joey insists that his participation is contingent on Jimmy involving Joey's two brothers (Jack Quaid and Brian Gleeson), a couple of guys who probably never will be mistaken for MENSA candidates.

Two additional performances are worth mention. Seth MacFarlane shows up as Max Chilblain, a British race car impresario, and Hilary Swank makes a late-picture appearance as a cop who's trying to nab the thieves.

Like many heist movies, Logan Lucky requires a healthy suspension of disbelief, and it's tough to avoid not thinking of the movie as a kind of knockoff of Soderbergh's Ocean's series, only with dirt under its fingernails.

I enjoyed Logan Lucky, even though I was seldom unaware that I was watching actors tapping into their inner rednecks. As it stands, the cast seems to be having the kind of good time that transfers to an audience.

A couple of clicks toward even more weirdness and Logan Lucky might have landed Soderbergh in Coen Brothers territory. Now that really would have been something to behold.

Addicted to the highs of madness

Katie Holmes and Luke Kirby co-star in a movie about bipolar lovers.

A deglamorized Katie Holmes plays a young poet suffering from bipolar disorder in Touched With Fire, a movie inspired by a 1993 non-fiction exploration of mania, depression and creativity by Kay Redfield Jamison.

Written and directed by Paul Dalio -- himself a sufferer from bipolar disorder -- the movie version teams Holmes with Luke Kirby, who portrays a struggling bipolar wannabe artist who wanders the streets of New York drawing graffiti. Kirby's Marco doesn't need much encouragement to advance his avidly delivered theories about the universe and his place in it. He can't believe that he doesn't hail from a distant planet where he'd feel more at home. He wants to get as high as the stars.

Dalio's script raises questions about whether it's possible to live a daringly creative life without simultaneously falling prey to bouts of madness. If Carla and Marco stay on their meds will they lose the creative spark that brings them together when both are hospitalized?

Once released from care, Carla and Marco become a couple, raising questions about how fit they are to make the kinds of decisions that now will be required of them, particularly when Carla becomes pregnant.

Katie's mom (Christine Lahti) and her father (Bruce Altman) are rightfully worried. Marco's father (Griffin Dunne) is no less concerned.
Both Holmes and Kirby are more than up to the task, and Dalio mostly tells the story from their points of view. In their manic phases, it's as if both have awakened inside Van Gogh's Starry Night, a painting that figures prominently in the story. Carla and Marco are energized by the enchantment of their vertiginous upswings in mood.

And that leads to another question. Would it be worth giving up the highest of highs for a stable life or are the peak points of mania so wildly intense and visionary that normality pales by comparison?

The problem Dalio has stems from this focus. Telling the story mostly from Carla and Marco's perspective tends to make us sympathetic to their desires (particularly strong with Marco) not to give up the inspirational peaks of their manic periods.

Dalio tries to temper this view with an awkwardly inserted, late-picture appearance by Jamison. She assures Carla and Marco that they can take their meds without diminishing their creative powers.

This less-than-organic ploy (almost a public service announcement) comes off as a near apology for shifting our sympathies toward Carla and Marco, an ungainly reminder that bipolar disorder doesn't count as a higher form of insight and fun.

None of this is to say that Dalio's movie fails to illuminate many of the problems stemming from bipolar disorder, and it finds credible ways of illustrating bipolar highs without too much overstatement.

And there powerfully observed moments. Near the beginning, Dunne's character visits his son, who hasn't been answering his phone. The young man's apartment has become a filthy clutter of books and junk. Marco has quit his job.

To us, it appears as if Marco's life has become a hopeless shambles: He, on the other hand, believes he has put his life on exactly the right course.

That kind of scene -- and there are others -- keeps Touched With Fire honest and affecting.

'Woman in Gold' fails to mine rich ore

Helen Mirren headlines a story about the quest to recover art looted by the Nazis.

The story of how a persistent woman and her inexperienced young attorney manage to reclaim five Nazi-looted paintings by artist Gustav Klimt suggests a powerful drama dealing with the continuing reverberations of the Holocaust.

Woman in Gold builds its story around one of those paintings, Klimt's 1907 painting Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. But if Klimt's gold-leafed portrait deserves masterpiece status, the movie about efforts to restore it to its rightful feels like by-the-numbers, Middlebrow fare.

Helen Mirren brings the expected amount of wit and bite to the role of Maria Altmann, one of the few surviving members of a wealthy, cultured Viennese Jewish family.

After the Anschluss, Maria and her husband escaped to the U.S. Most of the rest of Maria's family was killed by the Nazis, who also looted the Altmann art collection, including the portrait of Maria's aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer.

Years later, the Austrians have come to regard the Bloch-Bauer portrait as a national treasure. Referred to as "Austria's Mona Lisa," the painting carries a price tag of more than $100 million.

Early on, Maria -- already in her 80s and living in Los Angeles -- hires attorney Randy Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds) to help her retrieve the art, perhaps as a way of keeping her family heritage alive.

The grandson of composer Arnold Schoenberg, Randy predictably resists -- at least initially. Just as predictably, he becomes absorbed by the case, which slowly takes over his life.

Bland to the point of blankness, Reynolds adds little to the proceedings. In another performance that hardly registers, Katie Holmes plays the attorney's wife.

Working from a screenplay by Alexi Kaye Campbell, director Simon Curtis (My Week With Marilyn) adopts an overly familiar structure, juxtaposing action in the present with war-time flashbacks in which Nazis move toward annihilating Vienna's Jewish population.

The best of these flashbacks show the lavish pre-war lives of a well-assimilated Jewish family that sees itself as a part of the city's fabric.

Max Irons portrays Maria's husband, an opera singer, and Allan Corduner appears as Maria's father, a man who can't quite believe that his secure position in Vienna could crumble so quickly.

As Aunt Adele, Antje Traue brings vibrant sophistication to the role of the woman whose portrait is at the movie's heart, and as a young Maria, Tatiana Maslany embodies the tension and fear that's being inflicted upon Jewish families.

Though well-shot, the movie's flashbacks tend to be overused and telegraphed.

An example: To pursue the case, Maria reluctantly agrees to return to Austria. After a meeting with Austrian officials, she tells Schoenberg she wants to walk back to her hotel alone. It almost seems as if she's excusing herself so that she can have another flashback.

Curtis does a reasonably good job of guiding us through the legal tangles surrounding attempts at restitution, battles that involve Austrian committees and art bureaucrats, as well as a 2004 appearance before the U.S. Supreme Court. An Austrian arbitration panel finally brought the case to its conclusion in 2006.

In Vienna, an Austrian journalist (Daniel Bruhl) helps Maria and Randy in their battle, but this character also could have used more fleshing out.

The issues involved in Altmann's story are rich enough: Maria's understandable resistance to setting foot on Austrian soil and unresolved questions about how much Holocaust awareness depends on a vanishing generation of survivors.

Rather than allowing these issues to open up for us, Curtis keeps them encased in a drama in which they don't fully resonate.

Woman in Gold isn't a bad movie, and its story is interesting enough to keep us engaged, but it needed more than dogged competence to give startling new life to the horror and injustice that are so much a part of this tale.

A familiar helping of sci-fi

Another adaptation of a popular young adult novel.

When a society seems perfect, it's probably time to start worrying.

That's part of the warning delivered by The Giver, an artful if slightly bland adaptation of a 1993 young adult novel by Lois Lowry.

Carefully assembled by director Phillip Noyce and boasting strong adult participation from Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Alexander Skarsgard, and Katie Holmes, The Giver serves as a well-made -- if too familiar -- cautionary tale about the perils of an over-controlled society that has tried to eliminate all knowledge of the past.

You needn't have read the book to know that someone -- in this case a young character named Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) -- eventually will challenge the prevailing order.

The story begins when young Jonas is selected as the Receiver of Memory, the one person who'll learn the real history of humanity prior to its imprisonment in this apparently idyllic world.

Jonas is introduced to memory -- and the pain it brings -- by The Giver (Bridges), a grizzled fellow who's allowed to know all of human history.

Because he possesses such knowledge, The Giver occasionally is called upon to advise the ruling elders about potential dangers that need immediate redress -- or something like that.

The Giver also has the power to transmit images from the past simply by grabbing Jason's arms and establishing a mind link, thereby saving his charge the trouble of having to read any of the many books in The Giver's vast library.

The movie opens at a ceremony in which Jason graduates into his adult role. His two best friends: Fiona (Odeya Rush) and Asher (Cameron Monaghan) are assigned their tasks, as well.

Jason's parents (Skarsgard and Holmes) watch the proceedings along with the rest of the parents, who aren't biological parents but adults selected for parenting roles.

Streep plays the Chief Elder, a woman with a school principal's smile and a hair style that looks as if it were borrowed from Cher. The chief elder keeps order by eliminating most of what we regard as human impulse.

Noyce shoots segments in the movie's sterile, smiley-faced utopia in black and white, introducing vivid color as Jason begins to see a more flavorful but dangerous world under The Giver's tutelage.

Of course, the colorless world in which all homes are the same and in which daily injections suppress both positive and negative emotions harbors hidden dangers. Babies judged "inferior" are killed, as are some of the elderly.

Looking like The Dude after a weird makeover, Bridges -- also one of the movie's producers -- adds gravitas, and Streep avoids Cruella de Vil cliches in a role that isn't likely to be pressed into her book of memories.

The young actors give serviceable enough performances. Skarsgard and Holmes are short-changed by the fact that they're playing characters with minimal personalities.

The movie unravels a bit during an ending that underscores the story's implausibilities, and the tale's main issues hardly qualify as startlingly original.

The Giver comes off as a well-intended helping of sci-fi built around a moral lesson: The problem with eliminating all of our worst tendencies is that it also does away with the best. That, of course, proves little aside from demonstrating that The Giver has a firm grasp of the obvious.