'White Noise' never seems to find its footing

   In adapting Don DeLillo's 1985 novel, White Noise, for the screen, director Noah Baumbach has made a wildly uneven movie that soars and sinks until it arrives at a brilliant end-credit musical number set to LCD Soundsystem's New Body Rhumba. 

      Some of White Noise struck me as abrasively funny, although it's easy to make fun of academic pretension, one of the movie's early preoccupations. Otherwise, Baumbach sends his movie here, there, and everywhere, spewing cleverness but never finding its footing. 

      Looking as if he hasn't made a trip to the gym in months, a pot-bellied Adam Driver plays Jack Gladney, a college professor specializing in Hitler studies, a field he pioneered. 

    Jack's wife Babette (Greta Gerwig)  works with the elderly and is addicted to pills known as Dylar. (What these pills do remains a mystery until near the movie’s end.)

   A fourth marriage for both Jack and Babette, the couple lives in a college town with the kids from their combined households, four in all.

   Don Cheadle turns up as Murray, one of Jack's colleagues, a professor who lectures on pop culture. Murray hopes to do for Elvis what Jack has done for Hitler, turn the King into an academic rage.

   At one point, Jack and Murray give dueling lectures that Jack treats as a clash of egos and which Baumbach deftly stages with each professor trying to out-dramatize the other.

    Baumbach soon introduces a disaster-movie element that’s foreshowed by an early-picture lecture Murray gives on the deeper meaning of car crashes in movies.

     When a truck and a train collide, the little college town that Jack and Babette call home is threatened by an "airborne toxic event." Toxic clouds pollute the air.

     Fearing contamination and heeding an evacuation order, the family piles into a station wagon and flees the advancing cloud. The movie suddenly becomes a cockeyed disaster pic full of roads glutted with traffic, impromptu shelters, and escalating fear.

    Baumbach keeps many of DeLillo's ironic jokes. Jack, for example, bills himself as an expert on Hitler but he doesn't speak German. Supermarkets become meccas of personal fulfillment. Consumerism attains the status of a new religion.

     All of this in the service of obliterating any consciousness of mortality in a culture that can't bear to face the prospect of death, a fear that haunts both Jack and Babette.

     A late picture development brings Jack face-to-face with unpleasant truths, including a confession of infidelity by Babette that leads to ... oh well ... it doesn't exactly matter because it feels as if Baumbach has deposited us in another movie, one in which Jack tries to unravel the mysteries of Dylar.

   Baumbach sets the story in the 1980s, just as DeLillo did. That means White Noise can feel dated. Amusing in spurts and obviously ambitious, White Noise never becomes a self-sufficient romp through a fractured culture.

    Instead, Baumbach's White Noise feels like a collection of the accumulated absurdities that once fired DeLillo’s imagination in a novel that many considered unfilmable. Pehraps they were right. Some things should be left on the page.

New ‘Space Jam’ aims low on the age scale

   LeBron James and Warner Bros. 

   If you ask me what Space Jam: A New Legacy is about, that's pretty much all I have to say. 

   Beginning with an ode to LeBron's basketball achievements and then turning into a running advertisement for Warner Bros, the movie branches out from the original Space Jam, which was released in 1996 and starred Michael Jordon.

   Early in the movie, James stresses the importance of fundamentals on the basketball court, a view that's at odds with a film that's overwhelmed by flash and dash, razzle-dazzle,  moves that may make you long for a time out.

   Warner has moved Space Jam into the 21st century by sending LeBron and his son Dom (Cedric Joe) into a virtual world run by Al-G-Rhythm (Don Cheadle), a villain who resides in a giant server. Al-G feels slighted because LeBron has rejected a bid to star in a video world that Al-G has created. 

   The movie also features a father/son story. LeBron pushes his son to play basketball, to "put in the work." Dom prefers inventing video games. He doesn't want to be a mirror image of his highly disciplined dad.

    Once inside Al-G's computer world, LeBron becomes a cartoon figure -- at least some of the time and the movie cooks up a plot that pits LeBron and his cartoon cohorts (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Foghorn Leghorn, and others) against the Goons, a team of menacing opponents modeled on real players such as Anthony Davis and Damian Lillard. 

    Can LeBron act? It hardly matters. He only has to be LeBron -- or some version of LeBron, in this case, the dad who learns that he must respect his son’s ambitions.

   Perhaps to amuse adults and maybe to remind the world of a  proud Warner Bros. history, you'll find references to Casablanca and Mad Max: Fury Road. Did I mention references to Harry Potter, Superman,  Scooby-Doo, and oddly for a kids' movie, Clockwork Orange?

    The big basketball game might have capped a brisk 60-minute movie, but New Legacy runs for one hour and 55 minutes and the game feels endless.

    Director Malcolm D. Lee (Girls Trip, Barbershop, the Next Cut) and a team of screenwriters push New Legacy toward the positive side of the value scale, but a message about allowing  young people to follow their interests seems muted in a movie whose style leans more toward agitation than illumination. 

    King Kong, Iron Giant, and others watch the big game from the sidelines. The stakes: If LeBron loses, he and his Tune pals will have to remain in Al-G's virtual world forever. If they win, they go home.

    Kids may respond to this amped-up cartoon, but for me,  a Tune victory and home couldn't come soon enough.

Don Cheadle's 'Sketches of Miles'

A look at a musician who could be as intimidating as he was talented.

Don Cheadle's Miles Ahead -- a foray into the turbulent world of jazz great Miles Davis -- tries to match Davis' musical inventiveness with a style that moves like jazz, stating a theme, then following it in one direction or another.

For much of the movie, Davis is not in a good place. From 1975 to early 1980, he didn't play his trumpet. Instead, he holed up in his New York home, doing drugs, drinking, smoking cigarettes and punching a heavy bag.

Cheadle -- who co-wrote the script with Steven Baigelman -- may have been trying to be worthy of Davis, who at one point in the movie says that if you're going to do something, it's best to do it with attitude.

Cheadle, who directed, follows suit: He brings a ton of attitude to his movie -- and to his performance as Davis.

Davis does everything to keep the rest of the characters off balance. During a time when he wasn't doing anything musically, Davis still knew how to flex his muscles. He's on guard, perhaps a bit paranoid. He's wary of those who try to invade his isolation.

The movie doesn't always stay within the five years before Davis' so-called comeback, a term Davis evidently hated. Comeback? He felt he hadn't gone anywhere.

Cheadle sometimes flashes back to Davis' romance with Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi), a dancer whom Davis courted, married and ultimately alienated. As Cheadle sees it, Frances was the love Davis never quite got over.

For all its inventiveness, Miles Ahead can't resist burdening itself with a plot. A journalist (Ewan McGregor) tries to weasel his way into Davis' world, claiming that he's writing an article for Rolling Stone.

McGregor's Dave Brill winds up joining Davis as he makes his various rounds. Eventually, they conduct a manic search for session tapes that have fallen into the hands of Harper Hamilton (Michael Stuhlbarg), an unscrupulous promoter who carries the burden of representing everything that's loathsome about the music business.

Davis' attempts to retrieve his tapes produces mixed results for the movie.

On one hand, Cheadle explores Davis' necessary rage. The idea that someone could own his music -- his expression -- seems outrageous to Davis, a painful reminder of the way many musicians are treated by an industry that turns them into commodities -- or at least often tries to.

The movie also effectively shows that Davis had no interest in repeating the music that made him famous in albums such as Birth of the Cool, Sketches of Spain, Round Midnight, Kind of Blue and more. He knew that when exploration dies, so does art.

But this part of the movie also produces hackneyed results, including a car chase and a scene in which Brill procures cocaine for Davis from a student at Columbia University. There are only so many scenes of Davis, smoking, drinking and snorting coke that any movie needs, and the wanderings of Brill and Davis, though somewhat antic in flavor, go nowhere.

Miles Ahead isn't really a bio-pic; I saw it as an attempt to show us what it might have been like to be in Davis' company, to get caught up in one of his self-destructive whirlwinds before he lands on the other side of chaos.

McGregor's character serves as the audience's surrogate in this regard; he never can entirely relax around Davis -- not only because he usually wants something from Davis, but because Davis intends to keep him off guard.

Cheadles' Davis is an artist of edgy integrity. Many people want a piece of him, but nobody gets close enough to take one.

Imperiled plane, imperiled pilot

Denzel Washington takes flight as an alcoholic airline pilot.

Flight -- the latest film from director Robert Zemeckis -- has all the markings of another Hollywood thrill ride. With Denzel Washington playing a commercial airline pilot, the movie seems headed for the kind of territory in which the steely expertise of a seasoned pilot saves an imperiled plane. You half expect an airborne version of Unstoppable, a terrific action movie in which Washington played an engineer trying to head-off a runaway train.

Although Flight features some of the most harrowing airborne sequences ever, it's as much about an imperiled life as an imperiled plane. From the opening scenes in a disheveled hotel room, it's clear that Washington's Whip Whitaker has a drinking problem that he tries to temper with head-clearing snorts of cocaine.

The story revolves around Whip's two lives: His life as a dissolute drunk and his life as a guy who believes he can leap from an alcohol-infused stupor to his highly demanding job without losing a step. It's the kind of confidence that comes from having done it before -- probably a lot.

But a flight from Orlando to Atlanta changes everything, and introduces some welcome moral complexity into Zemeckis's movie.

Whip is flying drunk when his plane experiences a grave mechanical failure. He's able to call on training and reflexes to deal with the situation, but there's no gainsaying his intoxication. He's a completely irresponsible hero who saves 96 of the plane's 102 passengers -- and does it without a miscue.

In a moment of extreme crisis, the captain in Whip takes command of the drunk, even to the point where Whip flies the plane upside down in order to slow its fall.

After its compelling opening and horrific crash-landing, the movie establishes itself as something else, the story of an addict whose ability to deceive himself and others is threatened by a National Transportation Safety Board investigation into the crash.

Washington -- who's now almost 58 and beefier than when he was younger -- gives a memorable performance as a man who has gone through a bitter divorce and seldom sees his teen-aged son. Whip has nothing going for him other than twined abilities: He can fly and he can lie.

The movie's early scenes introduce another character, a young heroin-addicted woman (Kelly Reilly) who, after an overdose, will meet Whip in the Atlanta hospital where he -- and the surviving passengers and crew -- are taken after the crash. For a time, Whip's life mingles with Nicole's at the family farm where Whip retreats to hide from the press.

I don't know if it was absolutely necessary, but a scene in which Whip, a cigarette smoker, meets Reilly's Nicole in the hospital is a real crowd-pleaser. Not because of anything Reilly or Washington do, but because of a monologue delivered by a cigarette-smoking cancer patient (James Badge Dale).

Clearly, this is Washington's show, although the supporting cast is quite good. John Goodman adds robust comic relief as a take-charge drug dealer, one of Whip's wayward pals. Don Cheadle plays the smart, amoral lawyer who's asked to guide Whip through his NTSB ordeal, and Bruce Greenwood portrays a long-time friend and union representative who's eager to turn attention away from pilot fallibility and onto failing equipment.

Washington's scenes with Cheadle are particularly interesting. As savvy as Cheadle's ("I can fix anything") character is and as wobbly as Washington's Whip becomes, Washington takes charge of every moment, never entirely letting go of Whip's defiance, bravado and percolating contempt.

Melissa Leo has a small but effective turn as an NTSB lawyer who wants to expose Whip for what he is.

Now, the movie is not without problems. It seems unlikely to me that a man such as Whip could hide his addiction from his employers. The movie suggests that others have served as Whip's enablers, but still. Moreover, the way in which the screenplay dispenses with the co-pilot's knowledge of Whip's condition struck me as far-fetched.

Zemeckis makes up for some of these problems with a agonizingly tense scene in which Whip -- in an attempt to straighten himself out -- tries to resist the siren call of a miniature bottle of vodka in a hotel mini-bar.

Back to live action after forays into animation with Polar Express and A Christmas Carol , Zemeckis doesn't flinch when it comes to showing alcoholic behavior. And I wondered whether the director of Forrest Gump and Back to the Future wasn't trying a little too hard to establish his hard-boiled bona fides.

Not to worry: After all the hard drama, Zemeckis brings the movie in for a soft landing with scenes that take some of the sting out of its previous tough-mindedness and which struck me as false.

Whatever its shortcomings, Flight benefits greatly from Washington's strength: Even when the movie falters, Washington's never anything less than riveting as a pilot whose life has spiraled out of control -- even while he's thinking that he's far too slick to land with a crash.

Plenty of grit, but to what end?

Wesley Snipes/Don Cheadle, strong work in a flawed effort.

One cop (Ethan Hawke) needs money to buy a house. Another (Don Cheadle) wants a promotion that he believes will liberate him from the morally murky world of undercover work. A third cop (Richard Gere) maintains a safe distance from conflict because he has only seven days remaining until retirement.

Such is the setup for director Antoine Fuqua's Brooklyn's Finest, a cop drama that commits a variety of big-screen felonies. Among them: The motivations given each character in a script by Michael C. Martin and Brad Caleb Kane tend to be over simplified, and a farfetched ending – bathed in the expected bloodshed – makes the entire movie feel contrived.

Fuqua, who directed Training Day, would seem the ideal candidate for getting the most out of Brooklyn's Finest, but the movie doesn't feel as if it has an overriding sense of purpose. Brooklyn's Finest doesn't fulfill the demands of either art or entertainment; it explores the down-and-dirty world of cops who've been tempted by corruption and, in some cases, have indulged their least honorable impulses, but it seems more interested in finding pumped-up drama than in unearthing any kind of truth.

A strong cast is supplemented by an appearance by Wesley Snipes, in what's being touted as a comeback performance. Snipes acquits himself well as a gangster who has won his release from prison thanks to an assist from Cheadle's character. Cheadle's Tango owed Snipes' Cas a favor, so he helped his buddy find a slick attorney who knew how to open slammer doors.

Cheadle gives his usually strong performance as a detective who's living with too much moral ambiguity. Hawke pushes himself to jittery extremes as Sal, a detective who's driven to do better by his family. But Gere seems wooden in this context; he's playing a cop with nothing in his life but vague retirement plans, an undistinguished record and a relationship with a hooker (Shannon Kane). (If you want to see Gere really handle the role of “dirty” cop go back to Mike Figgis' Internal Affairs (1990). Maybe Gere's better at police work in Los Angeles than in NYC.)

The supporting cast can't be faulted, although Lili Taylor is largely wasted as Sal's wife, a woman who's pregnant with twins. Will Patton plays the cop who keeps promising Cheadle's character a promotion, but never seems to deliver. And Ellen Barkin shows up in a quasi-comic role as a foul-mouthed federal agent who seems interested only in advancing her own career. Say this: Barkin refuses to get lost in an atmosphere where testosterone is the hormone of choice.

Watching Brooklyn's Finest is like watching lots of urban ingredients boil in a pot without ever figuring out exactly what dish is being cooked. The movie has plenty of hard-core urban dynamism, but – in the end (and especially at the end) – doesn't have much to show for it.