A boxer's search for redemption

 

At times while watching director Jack Huston's Day of the Fight, I felt as though I were watching an advanced acting class. You can almost feel actors digging to wring every bit of flavor out of every scene. Shot in black-and-white, Day of the Fight tells the story of a one-time middleweight champion trying to pull his life together after being released from prison. Michael C. Pitt plays Michael Flannigan, a boxer we follow on the day of his comeback fight at Madison Square Garden. Mike spends the day trying to mend fences with some of the major people in his life, notably his former wife (Nicolette Robinson) and teenage daughter. He also meets with his trainer Ron Perlman, an uncle (Steve Buscemi) who has been a major influence in his life, and a friend (John Magaro) from the old neighborhood who has become a priest.  Mike also visits the father (Joe Pesci) who tormented him as a kid but now is a demented old man staring out the window of the nursing home where he lives. Flannigan also makes a major bet on himself to win his bout. Huston's gritty New York story aims at the heart, but its beat is slowed by the extra weight of genre familiarity.

Diverse cast moves into 'House of Gucci'

  No swords, sandals or aliens can be found in director Ridley Scott's House of Gucci, a drama about the decline of the Gucci family and the murder of Maurizio Gucci, a crime engineered by his estranged wife. 

  The day after I saw the movie, the following headline appeared in Variety:"House of Gucci First Reactions Range From Absurdly Enjoyable to Bloated and Uneven Mess."

   Yes, I thought, that's it. Not one of those. All of them.

   The movie focuses more on internecine warfare among the Guccis than on Maurizio's murder. En route to the sensational 1995 crime -- for which the former Patrizia Reggiani was found guilty and served 18 years in an Italian prison -- the movie offers a sumptuous tour of the accouterments of Gucci wealth. 

   You'll also find an abundance of vividly incompatible performances given by a variety of actors speaking English in what amounts to a Babylon of variable Italian accents.  

    Sporting goggle-sized glasses, Adam Driver portrays the mild-mannered Maurizio Gucci, the man who was overwhelmed into marrying Patrizia, played in Scott's telling by Lady Gaga, who doesn’t shrink from the power of her considerable presence. 

   There's no universe in which I would have thought to cast Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons as brothers, but Scott pulls it off. 

    Irons portrays the thin-lipped, severely aristocratic Rodolfo Gucci, a man who rules over the company with his brother Aldo (Pacino), a portly exuberant man who looks as if he hasn’t denied himself many pleasures during his journey to great wealth.

   Scott brings lots of opera to the soundtrack. Why not? House of Gucci brims with oversized emotions, devious betrayals, and, finally, murder -- ingredients that fuel many operas.

   Gaga barges into the movie in much the same way as she barges into the Gucci family — willfully. She makes it clear that Patrizia easily could have overpowered the bookish Maurizio, rendered by Driver as an ineffectual young man who gradually accustoms himself to power and luxury.

    Of course, there's also Patrizia's swinging hips, generous cleavage, and pugnacious spirit.

And the rest of the cast .... 

 

 Unrecognizable after what must have been a gargantuan makeover, Jared Leto plays Aldo's son, a balding airhead of a man referred to by his father as "an idiot, but my idiot." Leto’s mumbled line readings are bizarre, amusing, and confounding. (Yes, that's Leto to the right, an actor who turns himself into a human special effect in  House of Gucci.)

   Salma Hayek signs on Pina, a psychic Patrizia discovers while watching TV and with whom she builds a relationship. Pina eventually helps Patrizia locate the assassins who will shoot Maurizio.

    Jack Huston appears as Domenico De Sole, a background figure who eventually moves forward to play a part in the financial drama in which the Guccis are expelled from their own empire.

   Truth be told, Scott -- working from a screenplay by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna -- doesn't do a great job with financial complications but the gist remains clear.

   At times, I wondered whether Scott was being serious or whether he was secretly gagging over high-fashion absurdity — its pretensions, its obsession with money, and its furious competitiveness.  

  At other times, I was sure that Scott was trying to be campy. 

  And at still other times, I thought he might be striving to create a great mercantile family drama.

  I settled on “all of the above.”  

 So here's my final word or two: From the start, House of Gucci, a lavish hunk of a movie, does its best not to succeed but manages to be entertaining anyway. Maybe someone should turn it into a real opera.

   And, then, there's Pacino's Aldo - vast of spirit, sloppily sentimental, and conniving. At times, I felt as if Pacino were about to swallow every scene that he's in -- and sometimes I wish he had.

    All I can say is set aside expectations and enjoy watching a director and his cast push, bully and insinuate themselves into a beautifully dressed world where trashy behavior and haute-couture pirouettes mingle and collide.

An FBI agent and his informant

 

     Drugs. Impoverished living. A rundown town where the coal mine has gone dead. FBI corruption. Infidelity. And, of course, murder.

     These days chances are good that we're talking about a movie set in the American South.

    Above Suspicion, from director Phillip Noyce, tells the real-life story of how, in 1989, a rising FBI star formed a relationship with the seductive informant who helped him build an ascending career. 

     A spoiler? Not entirely. The movie's ending is revealed in the opening scene, a nod to William Holden's narration in Sunset Boulevard. The narrator of the story, it seems, already is dead.

    "You know what's the worst thing about being dead?''the late  Susan Smith asks. "You get too much time to think."

     Starting the movie at the end leaves us with one major question: How did Susan wind up dead?

     Emilia Clarke, familiar from Game of Thrones, portrays the movie's narrator, Susan, a woman living in Pikeville, Ky. Susan has the profile you’d expect in a movie such as this. She lives with but is estranged from her drug-dealing husband (Johnny Knoxville). She's also in the midst of a welfare scam.

    Desperate for a change, Susan reads a lot into the sudden arrival in town of FBI agent Mark Putnam (Jack Huston). Susan spots the agent getting out of a car looking sharp and healthy. She's overpowered by a desire to connect, seeing Putnam as a way out of town.

    From the start, Susan knows that Putnam is married. Putnam's wife (Sophie Lowe) supports her husband and, for much of the movie, has no idea that he might have a dark side.

   Stuck in a town that's portrayed as dirtbag hell,  the ambitious Putnam thinks he might impress his superiors by solving a string of bank robberies. En route, he leads a drug bust at Susan's home, opening the door for him to enlist her as a snitch. 

   Susan has more on her mind than helping Putnam advance his career. She tries to seduce him. After some half-hearted  resistance, Putnam takes the bait.

   Clarke mostly brings Susan to life, allowing her looks to be defaced to depict Susan's slide into terrible drug abuse.

   Huston, who played a man who had half his face blown off in HBO's Boardwalk Empire, can't quite locate a core for a character who perhaps doesn't have one. Putnam is self-absorbed and ultimately dangerous.

   Thora Birch doesn't get a chance to do much as Susan's sister, a hairdresser. Among the supporting cast, Knoxville lands the hardest hit.

    Noyce's varied resume includes movies such as Patriot Games, The Bone Collector, and Rabbit Proof Fence. He's a good director but he’s working with a story that follows a downbeat arc based on a real-crime book written by Joe Sharkey.

    Sharkey’s observant, detailed prose did more to create involvement than Susan's forlorn narration. 

    On screen, Above Suspicion has its moments, but it never feels as if we're discovering anything revelatory as we follow these characters on their predictably doomed journeys.

Ben-Hur's chariot rolls again

An oft-told tale that didn't need repeating.

When a happy-go-lucky Jewish kid from a well-to-do family gets crosswise with the authorities, his life turns upside down.

No, not another Philip Roth novel. I'm talking the first century A.D., and that young man is none other than Judah Ben-Hur, the hero of an 1880 Lew Wallace novel that has spawned a variety of Hollywood movies. William Wyler's 1959 version remains the most notable big-screen effort, starring Charlton Heston as a revenge-seeking Judean who discovers forgiveness when he realizes, through exposure to Jesus, that there's more to life than getting even.

Now comes the 2016 version from director Timur Bekmambetov, who brought us Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. No further comment seems necessary.

In what may have been an effort to relate to contemporary audiences, a screenplay by Keith R. Clarke and John Ridley on occasion displays a tendency to blur the line between the language of 33 AD and 2016.

During the fabled chariot race, Ben-Hur tries to defeat Messala, a man who was taken in by Judah's family, but who grew up to become a powerful Roman centurion.

Sheik Illderim (Morgan Freeman in dreads) watches the race from the sidelines.

"Good move, Judah,'' says Illderim, as Judah executes a particularly tricky maneuver.

Why not, "Way to crush it, Judah, baby?"

Freeman, by the way, is the most recognizable name in a cast of largely unknown actors who probably haven't helped themselves make it to the A-list with what amounts to a drab sword-and-sandals march through the dawn of Christianity and Roman oppression of Judea.

Jack Huston and Toby Kebbell play the main roles in this Ben-Hur. Huston, who appeared behind a mask that covered half his face in HBO's Boardwalk Empire, is more fully exposed here as Judah Ben-Hur. Huston tries to create a Judah of life-sized proportions.

After the granitic renderings of Heston, it's an understandable choice, but one that reduces Judah's stature in epic-shrinking ways.

Kebbell, in the role played by Stephen Boyd in the 1959 version, doesn't fare much better as Messala.

This time, we see more of Jesus, who is played by Rodrigo Santoro. Given the recent spate of faith-based movies, I wondered whether an enlarged role for Jesus represented an attempt on the part of the filmmakers to appeal to that part of the audience that seeks out Christian-oriented entertainment.

But in this outing, Jesus' words serve mostly to italicize the meaning of the entire enterprise, which can be reduced to a single word, "forgive."

Judah, of course, has a long list of affronts that require forgiveness. His mother and sister were taken by the Romans. He was separated from his loving wife Esther. He spent five years as a galley slave, pulling on oars while a Roman behemoth pounded relentlessly on a drum.

In short, he was unjustly stripped of his aristocratic privileges and made to suffer.

Now, as for the great chariot race, the piece de resistance of any Ben-Hur movie ...

I saw Ben-Hur in 3D, which didn't make the race any more exciting than the one that Wyler served up more than 50 years ago, a more or less severe indictment in the age of CGI. Besides, Wyler's version boasted considerably more pomp.

Bekmambetov's fervid approach to editing is far too choppy for my tastes, and even the movie's pleasures of scale aren't first rate: the great stadium carved out of rock in which Pontius Pilate (Pilou Asbaek) stages chariot races and a sea battle in which vessels ram each other with harrowing force, for example.

In all, Ben-Hur is an uninspired work that appears toward the end of an already disappointing summer. Worse yet, it's a movie that demonstrates how far we've come from the days when movies could become events that tended to dominate the cultural conversation.

Ben-Hur may not become a legendary box office failure, but as an aspiring epic it feels like ... well ... just another movie -- and not a very good one, at that.