'Red Tails' offers a fleet history lesson

A rudimentary look at the battles the Tuskegee Airmen fought.

It's hardly surprising that the George Lucas-financed Red Tails puts lots of energy into flying sequences that evoke the terror and excitement of airborne battle.

Of course, Red Tails has more on its mind than zooming action. The movie also aims for social significance, telling the story of the Tuskegee Airman, black pilots who overcame prejudice and long odds to make significant contributions to the World War II combat effort.

Red Tails isn't the first feature to tackle the Tuskegee story, another being The Tuskegee Airman, a 1995 HBO movie starring Laurence Fishburne. The action in Red Tails may be a lot spiffier than what you'll find in its 1995 counterpart, but I found the older movie to be more comprehensive, more interesting and better acted - although both may be more earnest than they need to be.

As directed by Anthony Hemingway, from a screenplay by John Ridley and Aaron McGruder, Red Tails rides on bursts of bold action and straightforward exposition, some of which points out the alarming contradictions faced by airmen fighting for a country that didn't fully accept their humanity.

These highly educated men were relegated to flying behind-the-lines missions until a determined colonel (Terrence Howard) convinced a wary and sometimes bigoted Washington hierarchy that the Tuskegee Airmen -- stationed in Italy at the time - deserved a chance to fight.

Supposedly drawn from interviews with Tuskegee Airmen, the drama in Red Tails nonetheless has a cookie-cutter feel that limits the efforts of a large and appealing cast.

The screenplay's two main Tuskegee pilots are Joe "Lightning" Little (David Oyelowo) and Martin "Easy" Julian (Nate Parker.) Little and Julian are best friends but have fundamental disagreements that revolve around Julian's drinking and Little's risk-taking.

Cuba Gooding Jr., who appeared in the HBO movie, joins Howard as a ranking officer. He seems to be trying to provide all his scenes with an exclamation point by determinedly stuffing a pipe into his mouth.

Perhaps to add dramatic variety, Red Tails has Oyelowo's Little strike up a relationship with an Italian woman (Daniela Ruah). Maybe someone thought a few quiet moments were necessary to punctuate the atmosphere of robust camaraderie surrounding the fliers, who can be intensely competitive with one another.

Lucas has said that he had to finance the picture and pay for its distribution because studios shied away from an all-black cast. That may be true, and Lucas is to be commended for having the persistence to stay with a project that he began thinking about in 1988, but Red Tails can't be called a complete success.

In achieving some of the old-fashioned zeal for which it must have been aiming, Red Tails sacrifices much of the edge we've come to expect from the best war movies.

That's not to say that Red Tails is without value. Young audiences in particular may know little or nothing about the segregated quality of civilian and military life during the 1940s. Deficiencies aside, Red Tails offers a zippy - if rudimentary -- history lesson, as well as plenty of affirmation of the achievements of the Tuskegee Airmen.

'Extremely Loud' and irritatingly quirky

The child at the center of director Stephen Daldry's adaptation of a Jonathan Safran Foer novel may wear on your nerves.

There are beautifully acted scenes in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the big-screen adaptation of a 2008 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, and the best of them can’t be written about in detail without including string of spoilers that might dilute the impact of a tear-jerker built around the residual pain of 9/11.

Acting aside, Extremely Loud manages to be a very mixed blessing. Director Stephen Daldry (The Reader, The Hours, and Billy Elliot) brings quiet assurance to material that can be moving but is also too self-consciously eccentric for its own good.

The story centers on 11-year-old Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), a kid who’s forced to adjust to the loss of his father (Tom Hanks). Hanks’ Thomas Schell happened to be at a meeting in the World Trade Center on the fateful September day when the world seemed to change forever.

I had at least two reactions to Horn’s performance. On the one hand, I found him to be annoying enough to sometimes undermine the sympathy we naturally should feel for a kid in his situation. There are hints that Oskar suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, but they are not developed. Look, at his worst, Oskar can be insufferable.

At other times, I found myself thinking that Horn’s performance was nothing short of amazing, considering that he’s been asked to carry the movie. Daldry reportedly discovered Horn after seeing him on Jeopardy, and then proceeded to put him into nearly every scene in the film.

Early on, Daldry establishes an affectionate relationship between Oskar and his dad. A jeweler by trade, Hanks’ Thomas engages and sometimes frustrates his son by setting up a variety of problems for young Oskar to solve, including the fanciful task of finding the missing sixth borough of New York City.

Oskar is nothing if not persistent, so it’s hardly surprising that he concocts an elaborate project that allows him to cling to his father’s memory. Mom (Sandra Bullock in a fine performance) grapples with her own grief.

Here’s how Oskar’s plan works: While rummaging through his father’s closet, Oskar finds a key and a name – Black -- in a vase. He decides that the key and the name must be clues that his father meant for him to follow. He decides that he must locate every Black in the New York City phone book to determine just what lock this key opens.

That's already a bit of stretch, but Extremely Loud further undermines its credibility with persistent quirkiness that can make Oskar seem more like a literary conceit than a real kid.

Oskar communicates with his grandmother (Zoe Caldwell) via walkie-talkie. She lives in an apartment across the courtyard from Oskar's apartment. Oskar's condescending and rude to the doorman of his apartment (a wasted John Goodman). Oskar so repeatedly refers to 9/11 as “the worst day” that the phrase wears itself out. He’s spooked by public transportation, and when he’s out and about, he carries a tambourine, which seems to function as a kind of security blanket.

Eric Roth’s screenplay also introduces a character called The Renter (Max von Sydow), an old man who rents a room in Grandma’s apartment. Oskar is warned to stay away from The Renter, a sure sign that the two are destined for a significant encounter.

Did I mention that The Renter doesn’t speak? Well, he doesn’t. He communicates either by showing the palms of his hand (on which he’s written “yes” and “no”) or scratching brief notes on a small pad. More quirkiness, but von Sydow is believably strange.

The movie comes closest to something truly heartfelt when Oskar meets an investment adviser played by a remarkably quiet and palpably tender Jeffrey Wright. He’s a guy who’s in the process of divorcing his wife, an equally good Viola Davis.

Images of 9/11 to soup-up the drama, but for all its emotional heavy lifting, Extremely Loud feels too arty and idiosyncratic fully to work. At nearly every turn, Extremely Loud seems to be trying way too hard to convince us of its specialness.

She's young, gifted and gay

A coming-of-age story with Hip-Hop kick.

Few things are as resistant to upset as the apple cart of parental expectation. And for some middle-class families, coming to terms with a child’s gayness can qualify as a threat to deeply entrenched values.

But what about the gay child? What’s life like for him or her in a household ruled by denial? And what if that child happens to be black?

That’s more or less the question answered by Pariah, a powerful and affecting drama that centers on Alike (Adepero Oduye), a gay, self-aware high school student who’s still got one foot in the closet.

Alike’s dad (Charles Parnell) is a cop; her mom (Kim Wayans) looks for solace at church and suspects that her husband might be having an affair. Neither parent is prepared to deal with the sexuality of a straight daughter – much less a gay one.

For her part, Alike (pronounced All-Lee-Keh), endures a tense existence with her parents and her younger sister (Sahra Mellesse) in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn.

A good student and budding writer, Alike tries to hold her world together. It’s not easy. She changes clothes when she leaves the house, donning a kind of genderless Hip-Hop look, sometimes hanging out at a gay club.

Oduye does lots of things well, including capturing Alike’s pain and the intensity with which she assess every situation in which she finds herself. Oduye’s playing a character who’s not fully formed and can’t be until her truth is acknowledged – particularly by a father who insists she’s “normal” and a mother who has enough suspicions about her daughter that she wants her husband to intervene.

Dad resists, and after a conversation in which Alike tries to talk to him about love, he concludes that she must have a boyfriend.

You’ll appreciate Oduye’s deeply felt performance even more if you know that she’s a 33-year-old actress; she obviously hasn’t forgotten that at 17, emotional setbacks tend to hurt more than they will in later life.

At one point, Alike’s mother pushes her daughter into a friendship with “good girl” Bina (Aasha Davis). This relationship – which is supposed to steer Alike away from the bad influence of the openly gay Laura (Pernell Walker) – becomes pivotal for Alike in unexpected ways.

As often seems to be the case these days, the adults in Pariah live in a totally different world than their children. Mom and Dad have worked hard to attain and maintain a middle-class lifestyle, which means they also embrace the kind of convention that makes it difficult for them to accept a gay daughter.

Director Dee Rees, who also wrote the screenplay, tends to work in a style that includes lots of close-ups. Cinematographer Bradford Young uses them to make us understand the claustrophobic nature of a world that has yet to open for Alike.

An end-of-picture plot twist may resolve things for Alike too conveniently, but Rees has made a movie that’s open-ended enough to make us wonder what all its characters might be like a year from the time the final credits roll. You'll find the expected coming-of-age triumph here, but it’s tempered by Rees’ knowledge that not all the wounds we’ve seen opened are likely to heal.

The Award Machine Powers Up

The Golden Globes loom for Sunday evening (Jan. 15). I've never taken the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which awards the Globes, all that seriously -- not that I have anything against critics associations or foreigners, for that matter. Look, I'm not going to rattle on about awards, but -- for the record -- I'm reporting the results of voting in the two critics' groups in which I cast ballots. It should go without saying that the winners don't necessarily reflect how I may have voted. The Broadcast Film Critics Association gave out its Critics Choice awards in Los Angeles last evening (Jan. 12). The Denver Film Critics Association announced its streamlined year-end awards list earlier this week.

As you peruse these lists, keep one thing in mind. As Mickey and Sylvia alerted us in their classic 1956 song, Love is Strange. That goes for movie love, too.

The Broadcast Film Critics Association

Best picture: The Artist
Best actor: George Clooney, The Descendants
Best actress: Viola Davis, The Help
Best supporting actress: Octavia Spencer, The Help
Best supporting actor: Christopher Plummer, Beginners
Best acting ensemble: The Help
Best director: Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Best comedy: Bridesmaids
Best animated film: Rango
Best foreign film: A Separation
Best young actor or actress: Thomas Horn, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Best documentary feature: George Harrison: Living in the Material World
Best adapted screenplay: Moneyball, Steve Zaillian, Aaron Sorkin, story by Stan Chervin
Best original screenplay: Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen
Best cinematography (tie): The Tree of Life and War Horse
Best art direction: Hugo
Best editing: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Best make-up: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
Best visual effects: Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Best sound: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II
Best action movie: Drive
Best song: Life's a Happy Song, The Muppets
Best score: The Artist




The Denver Film Critics Association

Best picture: The Tree of Life
Best actor: Brad Pitt, Moneyball
Best actress: Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady
Best supporting actor: Christopher Plummer, Beginners
Best supporting actress: Shailene Woodley, The Descendants
Best director (tie): Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life and Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Best screenplay, adapted or original: The Descendants, Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash
Best animated feature: Rango
Best ensemble: The Descendants
Best original score: The Artist, Ludovic Bource
Best breakout star: Jessica Chastain
Best documentary: Page One: Inside the New York Times
Best foreign language film: A Separation

'Contraband' smuggles a few thrills into January

Mark Wahlberg stars in a caper movie that's not nearly as ambitious as some of what he's produced.

There are two ways to look at a movie such as Contraband. As a hard-boiled thriller compared to dozens of other similar movies, it's not exactly a groundbreaker. If, on the other hand, you're prone to seasonal generosity, you may want to regard Contraband as a serviceable entertainment, particularly for those seeking a quick genre fix.

An admission: I don't always get Mark Wahlberg, who's building one of the great mixed-bag resumes. He's produced great shows on HBO (Entourage and Boardwalk Empire), and has given really strong performances in movies (The Departed and The Fighter). With Contraband, Wahlberg works hard to turn in another performance as a regular guy, a former smuggler who's working hard to go straight, but he doesn't seem to be operating on the most ambitious side of his ledger.

Contraband focuses on Wahlberg's Chris Faraday, a married man and father who has started his own security alarm business as he tries to leave his criminal past behind. There's not much dramatic ore to be mined in movies about former felons who give up lives of crime, so the movie must find a way to force a reluctant Faraday back on the wrong side of the law.

It doesn't take long for us to learn that Faraday's brother-in-law (Caleb Landry Jones) has screwed up a drug smuggling job. As a result, he owes major money to a vicious mobster, Giovanni Ribisi in another over-the-top performance as a smuggler with a sadistic streak.

The only way Chris can ride to his brother-in-law's rescue is to set up another smuggling job with help from a buddy (Ben Foster).

The most interesting thing about Contraband may be its milieu. The movie begins in New Orleans, but winds up spending a fair amount of time working its way through the world of container ships. Faraday stages a smuggling caper that takes him to Panama and brings him into contact with various thugs as the plot expands to involve counterfeit money, cocaine and a Jackson Pollack painting. Don't ask.

The supporting cast, some of it underutilized, includes Kate Beckinsale in the somewhat thankless role of Chris' wife, a woman who's increasingly threatened as the movie wears on, and J.K. Simmons, as the captain of the ship that Chris uses for his smuggling operation.

Director Baltasar Kormakur, who starred in the Icelandic original on which Contraband is based, doesn't always help matters, directing in an edgy, abrupt style that can be more disorienting than exciting.

Kormakur deserves credit for wrapping up a lot of details in fairly short order, even if the ending doesn't deliver quite enough kick to lift Contraband out of the thriller ghetto. Having said that, I'll add that I didn't really mind the movie, and even got caught up in it at times. I know this isn't going to sound like high praise, but for all its problems and loose ends, Contraband is ... well ... OK.

'Carnage' draws blood, but only a trickle

What happens when the parents are not all right?

Carnage, a big-screen adaptation of a play by Yasmina Reza, struck me as Edward Albee light, 79 minutes of burgeoning sarcasm and spewed venom that's supposed to deprive its characters of all their civilized pretexts.

But instead of feeling like a scathing revelation, this semi-satirical drama seems only to be putting its characters through a lot of pre-determined motions. The game feels rigged, and it's not all that interesting anyway.

The story is simple. Two sets of New York parents meet after the son of one has attacked the son of the other with a stick, knocking out a couple of teeth. One set of parents seems determined to use the incident as a teaching moment; the other seems vaguely conciliatory, but we know from the outset that the initially hopeful mood will give way to something far less polite.

The acting, alas, struck me as variable. Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz portray Alan and Nancy Cowan. She's an investment adviser; he's an attorney. The Cowans visit the apartment of Michael and Penelope Longstreet (John C. Reilly and Jodi Foster), parents of the boy who was clobbered.

To some degree, Carnage aims at satirizing middle-class pretensions. Only Waltz's Alan Cowan, a lawyer who's representing a pharmaceutical company in the midst of a crisis, seems reluctant to play the role of deeply concerned parent. He's too busy taking calls on his cell phone, much to the annoyance of his wife and also, I'm afraid, the audience.

Of all the actors, Winslet struck me as most convincing -- with Reilly bringing up a reasonable second. Foster, on the other hand, seems miscast as a mother who carries her liberal values with stiff determination and self-righteous fury. Foster's performance vacilates between brittle and shrill and, at times, she seemed so overwrought I feared her head might explode.

Credit director Roman Polanski for keeping the proceedings fleet and for preventing the movie -- set almost entirely in one Brooklyn apartment -- from feeling boxed in.

Reza's play, first staged in France, came to Broadway starring James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Harden, Jeff Daniels and Hope Davis. I can imagine that being in the company of the actors would give this material a considerable boost. But on film, Carnage comes across as not terribly insightful and only fitfully amusing.

Streep's strong. 'Iron Lady?' Not so much

Meryl Streep scores as Margaret Thatcher, but the movie misses the mark.

The moment I saw Meryl Streep's meticulously aged and slightly unrecognizable face in The Iron Lady, two words inevitably leaped to mind: Oscar nomination. This isn't necessarily Streep's fault, but thoughts of future encomiums automatically seem to crop up whenever Streep appears in a movie that requires an accent.

And in this case, Streep's not only playing a famous and controversial woman, she's playing someone suffering from dementia, which turns over an additional Oscar trump: the disease card.

I don't meant to diminish Streep's achievement, which is considerable, but she -- like everyone else -- must live with a reputation, and I think it says something (not necessarily positive) that you may leave Iron Lady talking more about Streep's performance than about the woman she's playing.

Thatcher, of course, is a movie-worthy subject. The former British Prime Minister -- more or less Britain's answer to Ronald Reagan -- spent 11 years trying to dismantle Britain's version of what conservatives pejoratively call "the welfare state." I'm always wary of politicians who want to save their countries from decline, and Thatcher was that kind of leader. The daughter of a grocer, she thought that hard work and grit were life's great cure-alls.

Whatever you think of Thatcher, it's fair to say that Iron Lady misses the mark. Streep may be pitch perfect as the doddering Thatcher, but the movie spends entirely too much time on this part of the prime minister's life, which is sad but not nearly as interesting as her rise to power -- first as a member of Parliament, then as Secretary of State for Education and Science, then as leader of the opposition party and, finally, as prime minister.

As directed by Phyllida Lloyd, from a script by Abi Morgan, Iron Lady falls victim to its own flashback structure. While recalling her past, Thatcher wanders about her quarters having conversations with her dead husband (Jim Broadbent), who we see. Thatcher's canny enough not to conduct these hallucinatory talks in the company of others.

Because she's smart and practiced, Thatcher knows how to maintain a decent front, although the people closest to her -- notably her daughter (Olivia Colman) -- know what kind of shape she's in. Thatcher seems to miss her son Mark, who lives in South Africa and who remains unseen throughout the proceedings.

Streep and Broadbent have some nice moments together, and Broadbent seems to capture some of Denis Thatcher's pluck, even though we only see him as a figment of his wife's imagination.

Although she doesn't look like Streep, Alexandra Roach does an equally nice job as a young and upcoming Thatcher, a woman who begins to explore a political career and who is encouraged by her beau and future husband (Harry Lloyd).

Credit Lloyd with pulling off a tricky bit of business; he looks nothing like Broadbent, but somehow manages to suggest that he grew into the man we meet in Thatcher's delusions.

The movie's 13-member make-up department, which includes prosthetics people, a contact lens optician and a silicon technician -- turns Streep into Fort Thatcher, an imposing and fortified woman whose frailties have begun to show through. Streep looks too much like Thatcher in her dotage and not enough like Thatcher in her prime. Maybe it doesn't matter: She has some pleasingly arch scenes with the men who surround her, listening to their advice while retaining a sense of independence and authority that ultimately veers into tyrannical dominance.

But as the movie fluctuates between Thatcher's addled present and her powerful past, it can't seem to decide whether to applaud her feminist pluck or condemn her political ego. And in dealing with such matters as Britain's war in the Falklands, I'm not sure Iron Lady takes much of a position at all, except to say that the victory restored Thatcher's waning popularity.

So, yes, Streep no doubt will get her Oscar nomination, but we didn't need a movie about Margaret Thatcher to tell us that it's sad to watch a once-commanding person ravaged by dementia or that a long marriage has its tender moments or that an ambitious, intelligent woman worked hard to become one of the most powerful people on the planet. And we certainly didn't need a movie that doesn't seem to know which of those things qualifies as most intriguing.

A yakuza-palooza of a movie

A Japanese mob movie that doesn't skimp on violence.

With his new movie, Outrage, Takeshi Kitano not only has put his toe back in yakuza waters, he has taken a full-body plunge. (Kitano's last yakuza film was 2000's Brother.) The opening of the movie involves a slow pan of limos. Drivers and assorted flunkies wait for their bosses to leave a big mob meeting. It's a master stroke from Kitano, who also appears in the movie and who may most familiar to American audiences for The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi. It's an off-beat but telling way to introduce us to this strange and increasingly violent world. Like feudal lords the bosses are surrounded by retainers who cool their heels away from the main action. It takes time to sort through the confusing gaggle of feuding mob bosses -- both petty and important. What's not confusing is Kitano's use of graphic violence, including a scene involving a mobster and a dentist's drill that forced me to avert my eyes. As an actor, Kitano is known as Beat Takeshi. Here, he plays Otomo, a mob guy who takes on the kind of assignments others won't do and executes them without much fuss or complaint. Otomo is ordered to work against one boss, but eventually learns that in a world of rampant betrayal, trust can prove fatal. The ending is more downbeat than you might expect, and not everyone will be able to tolerate the movie's excruciatingly depicted violence. But Kitano's fans won't want to miss the director's re-entry into the world of the yakuza, where giving someone the finger means something entirely different than it does in most American contexts. Outrage is a yakuza movie that sometimes smirks in the same way as Otomo, who seems to know he's stuck in a world populated by the most ruthless of vipers.*

*Connecting the dots: In the current issue of The New Yorker (Jan. 9, 2012), Peter Hessler profiles Jake Adelstein, an American who has been writing about the yakuza for years. At one point, Hessler quotes an ex-yakuza as telling him that a yakuza must think of himself as being on stage. "If you're bad at playing the role of a yakuza, then you're a bad yakuza." I couldn't resist applying this quote to Outrage, in which some of the yakuza performances erupt in exaggerated fury. That, of course, raises an interesting question about Japanese gangsters and other major role players. At what point does the act become real? Being a yakuza may require acting skills, but when the performance turns violent, does it become something else? When Hamlet ends, the stage is littered with corpses, but after the curtain falls, the actors get up and go about their business. The same can't be said for the most unfortunate of yakuza victims. Oh well, I can feel myself starting to go in circles here, but I wanted to add this note as an aid to understanding and perhaps appreciating some of the performance styles in Outrage.

Broadcast critics set for year-end honors

Hugo and The Artist lead the field of Broadcast Film Critics nominees.

Just when you thought it was safe to put your formal wear back in mothballs, it's once again time to dig out the old tuxedo. OK, maybe that's not true for you (or me), but it certainly applies to lots of Hollywood folks who are about to hop a ride on the annual awards express.

The Broadcast Film Critics Association begins the season with its 17th annual awards show, which will be broadcast on VH1 live from the Hollywood Palladium on Jan 12 at 6 p.m. (MST). Comics Paul Scheer and Rob Huebel will host the event.

If you like star-gazing, it's worth knowing that the nominees all tend to show up for BFCA event, which this year features a musical and film tribute to Martin Scorsese, who also happens to have directed one of the year's most nominated movies. Scorsese's Hugo garnered 11 nominations, as did The Artist. Both films were one nomination shy of the record 12 nominations garnered by Black Swan a year ago.

The BFCA (the largest critics' organization in the U.S. and Canada) has some 250 members who ply their trade on television, radio or on line. That includes me. Maybe I'm biased, but I think the BFCA awards are a better bellwether for Oscar than the much-hyped Golden Globes.

To whet your appetite, here's a list of the major BFCA nominees:

BEST PICTURE
The Artist
The Descendants
Drive
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
War Horse


BEST ACTOR
George Clooney – The Descendants
Leonardo DiCaprio – J. Edgar
Jean Dujardin – The Artist
Michael Fassbender – Shame
Ryan Gosling – Drive
Brad Pitt – Moneyball

BEST ACTRESS
Viola Davis – The Help
Elizabeth Olsen – Martha Marcy May Marlene
Meryl Streep – The Iron Lady
Tilda Swinton – We Need to Talk About Kevin
Charlize Theron – Young Adult
Michelle Williams – My Week With Marilyn

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Kenneth Branagh – My Week With Marilyn
Albert Brooks – Drive
Nick Nolte – Warrior
Patton Oswalt – Young Adult
Christopher Plummer – Beginners
Andy Serkis – Rise of the Planet of the Apes

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Bérénice Bejo – The Artist
Jessica Chastain – The Help
Melissa McCarthy – Bridesmaids
Carey Mulligan – Shame
Octavia Spencer – The Help
Shailene Woodley – The Descendants

BEST DIRECTOR
Stephen Daldry – Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Michel Hazanavicius – The Artist
Alexander Payne – The Descendants
Nicolas Winding Refn – Drive
Martin Scorsese – Hugo