Greed and murder on Osage land

  First things first: Credit director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Joe Roth with trying to wrestle David Grann's best-selling 2017 book, Killers of the Flower Moon, into a viable screenplay, not because they have succeeded brilliantly but because they're bound to shine additional light on a neglected chapter of American history.

   Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon tells the story of a wealthy white man who viewed himself as a benefactor of Oklahoma's Osage people while he schemed to steal the wealth the tribe acquired when oil was unexpectedly discovered on its land in 1897.

    Scorsese teams with frequent collaborators Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio for immersion into a world of betrayal, deceit, and unmitigated greed, taking a deep dive into period-piece trappings thanks to cinematographer Rodrigo Preito and production designer Jack Fisk. 

    The core story is too complex to reiterate in a review, so I'll give only a brief outline:

     De Niro's Bill "King" Hale connives to find a "legal" way to steal oil revenues from the Osage. Hale enlists the help of his nephew Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), a returning World War I veteran who treats his uncle like a mentor.

    Hale tells dim-bulb Ernest that if he were to marry an Osage woman, he'd put himself in line to inherit her wealth should she die before he does. In Fairfax, Okla., marriage bred thoughts of murder among unscrupulous whites.

      As Hale and his cohorts saw it, the Osage needed help dying. 

      A character without a moral center, Ernest falls for Mollie (Lily Gladstone) but soon recognizes that he's married into money. When his uncle leans on him to keep the money in the family, he's not talking about Mollie's family. 

       Mysterious, tender, and balancing life between two cultures (Osage and Catholicism), Gladstone gives a memorable performance. As a diabetic, Mollie spends the last half of the movie languishing in bed, as Ernest injects her with supposed doses of insulin, augmented by drugs Hale says will “calm her down.”

       Flower Moon is littered with murders, all of them prompted by racism and greed. Even at that, the movie doesn't show the full scope of the crimes against the Osage. Many of the Osage took ill with something corrupt doctors mysteriously called "wasting disease."

       Early on, Scorsese shows how the Osage reacted to their newfound wealth, enjoying the same excesses that whites might have indulged in given similar circumstances. Men bought flashy new cars. Women donned fashionable dresses, and a sense of Jazz Age inhibition took hold.

       Mollie's sister Anna (Cara Jade Myers) becomes a wild child of the age, a fiercely independent party girl destined to become a victim.

       Hale's strange blend of  righteous posturing ("a friend to the Osage") and evil make for an interesting combination. De Niro gives Hale a clenched nasty quality, accented by spectacles and button-down period attire. 

       DiCaprio has a more difficult task because he's walking a fine line between Ernest's oft-declared love of money and devotion to his wife and family. Ernest plays a role in the murder of Mollie's sister and her husband and he's generally in league with his uncle.

      Sporting a perpetual scowl, DiCaprio's Ernest eventually realizes  he's selling his soul. He does it anyway. 

      I'd say that neither actor totally blends into the proceedings; it's almost impossible for them not to dominate the movie.

      The white actors speak with Oklahoma accents that may make you think you've stumbled into a Cormack McCarthy novel;  Scorsese and Roth may try a little too hard to capture the rhythms of the American West.

      Osage women are represented by Mollie's sisters (Jillian Dion,  Meyers, Janae Collins) and by Mollie's mother (Tantoo Cardinal), a woman who makes no bones about mistrusting white ways.

      When an FBI agent (Jesse Plemons's Tom White) arrives to investigate the murders in the movie's third hour, the story gains some much-needed steam. White turns up long after the Osage had begged Washington to help solve crimes local law enforcement, under Hill's sway, ignored.

      The subtitle of Grann's book reads, The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.  The second part of the title doesn't receive much attention here, leaving Plemons to play an ordinary man who gets the best of people who thought they easily could outwit him.

       A through line of the detection, trial and punishment unfolds, albeit with wobbles. After his arrest, Ernest waffles about whether to testify against his uncle, supervised reunions between Ernest and Mollie take place, and other developments slow the march toward legal justice -- or a 1920s attenuated version of it.

        An epilogue in the form of a recreated true crime radio broadcast about the murders takes the movie into another dimension that not only robs the finale of some of its potency but introduces a new subject, media exploitation of crime.

        Scorsese could have devoted more time to the workings of the Osage Tribal Council and to the Osage themselves, and his movie is steeped more in mournful sadness than outrage, which tamps down its overall dramatic fire. 

         I wouldn't discourage anyone from seeing Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorsese may already have done that by making the movie three-and-a-half hours long, but I wouldn't call the movie a masterwork. Because we're talking about Scorsese and an important subject, that pretty much sums up what I have to say.

         

           

         

          

A father/son comedy that sinks

    Comedian Sebastian Maniscalco stars in About My Father, a comedy about a second generation Italian/American who wants to marry a Waspish young woman (Leslie Bibb). 

   The story's prospective fiancee identifies as an artists but makes paintings that illustrate little more than narrow imagination.  It risks overstating the case, but the same might be said of a movie that can’t escape its formulaic culture-clash arc.

  Sebastian's Sicilian immigrant father (Robert De Niro) built a life in Chicago as a hairdresser, a trade he still plies. 

   After a brief setup, De Niro's Salvo Maniscalco insists on  accompanying his wary son on a visit to meet the prospective in-laws, a preposterous group. Dad (David Rasche) runs a hotel Chaing. Mom (Kim Cattrall) is a US Senator. 

    Two brothers complete the cast of characters. One, an Ivy-League empty head (Anders Holm), has gone into the family business. The other (Brett Dier) aspires to be a spiritual healer, soothing himself by playing sound bowls. 

    Maniscalco, who wrote the screenplay with Austen Earl, slathers the story with class consciousness. Salvo insists that his son won’t fit into an upper-crust mold. He thinks his in-laws will view Sebastian as an intruder in a world of gated communities. 

   The major comic set piece, viewable in the trailer, tries to make a broad splash. On a yachting outing with his in-laws,  Sebastian dons  jet boots that propel him out of the ocean. His private parts are exposed (thankfully not to us) to the on-deck observers when his bathing suit slips.

   Directed by Laura Terruso,  About My Father gravitates toward such broad strokes as it moves toward its predictably sentimental ending. 

   De Niro probably could sleepwalk through these kind of comic roles but doesn’t. I guess that's something.

   Set during the course of a Fourth of July weekend, the movie’s main virtue is its brevity. About My Father lasts for one hour and 29 minutes.

  

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.

    

'The Irishman' -- stories from a hitman's past

Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci have made an epic that reminds us how terrific all of them can be.

I wondered why, at the end of director Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, I felt so sad. The movie concludes — and I don’t consider this a spoiler — with an aging union official, who’s also a hitman, contemplating his demise. Shouldn’t I have felt a sense of satisfaction that the inexorable flow of time was about to do to Frank Sheeran, a.k.a., The Irishman, what he had done to so many others?

The reason for the sadness, I think, is complex. It mixes love for the movies of my younger days with the arc of Frank's story. I'm unable to separate the two, so I'm not going to try.

Frank Sheeran first came to light in a 2004 book by Charles Brandt. Titled, I Heard You Paint Houses, the book included the claim that Frank killed Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamster boss who was revered by his membership. (Painting houses evidently is a mob euphemism for carrying out murders.)

For the record — and also in the movie — Frank also said he murdered Joey Gallo, a.k.a. Crazy Joe, a famous mob murder that took place in 1972 at Umberto’s Clam House in Manhattan's Little Italy.

In the movie, Robert De Niro portrays Frank and Al Pacino plays Hoffa. Frank’s closeness to Hoffa made the assassination possible. As someone who seldom seemed troubled by his work, Frank found himself in an uncomfortable position regarding Hoffa. He had to kill a man he admired and with whom he shared a common ethnic background.

Frank’s crime life began in earnest when he met Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), a soft-spoken guy who ran a crime family in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Bufalino took a liking to Frank and recommended him to Hoffa, who eventually made him a union official.

When Hoffa tried to reinstate himself as Teamster president after spending time in jail for jury tampering, the mob got tired of his bravado. They wanted him gone. Hoffa didn’t want to be gone. They decided to make him gone.

But the plot and its revelations about corruption, though carefully detailed in Steve Zaillian’s fine screenplay, aren’t at the heart of what makes The Irishman great.

To understand that, you need to understand that Scorsese, who'll be 77 when The Irishman begins its run on Netflix on Nov. 27, has returned to the gangster turf that spawned his signature work. Only this time, like his aging characters, he's moving at a slower pace. The Irishman runs for three hours and 20 minutes -- and, no, it never seemed too long to me.

In The Irishman, Scorsese seems to take less delight in the colorful way his characters speak and in the way their violence can spark a scene. A more deliberate pace takes the Scorsese's characters beyond amusement and, at times, even makes them seem a little pathetic.

The bulk of the action takes place in the 1950s and ‘60s, which enables Scorsese to use lots of period music. He begins with the Five Satins' In the Still of the Night for an opening that finds Frank old and friendless in a nursing home. He begins talking about his life. In The Still of the Night, the background singers chime in with a telling two-word refrain: "I remember. I remember."

As Frank remembers his life, dozens of characters come and go. Scorsese’s large cast includes Ray Romano, as Bill Buffalino, a Teamster attorney; Bobby Cannavale as a gangster Felix 'Skinny Razor' DiTullio; and an incendiary Stephen Graham, as Tony Provenzano, a New Jersey-based hot-head who challenged Hoffa’s Teamster leadership.

The connection to movies proves inescapable. It’s not only Frank who's dying: It’s a certain kind of gangster film; it’s the period in which De Niro, Pacino and later Pesci rose to prominence. The Irishman might be Scorsese’s goodbye to a part of his own big-screen life -- and maybe to his youth.

This is not to say that anyone in The Irishman plans to retreat from the screen. But I can’t imagine that they’ll ever make another film like The Irishman, an epic tale of corruption and color that reminds you that De Niro, who has been in a lot of questionable movies, still can be great, that Pacino’s flare and bombast can imbue a character with brute power, and that Pesci, the movie’s true revelation, can find a quiet resolve in himself, a sense of proportion that allows him to steal the movie. Bufalino asserts his power with a spirit bordering on resignation.

To allow his characters to appear youthful in early scenes, Scorsese employs a de-aging technique that can be a little disorienting, making the faces of his characters look slightly unreal at times. But somehow it works and the acting is so strong that the de-aging becomes part of the atmosphere Scorsese creates, one of estrangement and distance.

At one point, Bufalino and Frank drive across the country with their wives (Kathrine Narducci and Kate Arrington). They're en route to a wedding in Detroit, but the trip really is a cover for something more sinister. The drive crops up from time-to-time as Frank narrates a story full of vividly recalled memories that still feel anchored in the past.

I loved that sense of fading time about The Irishman, which also has plenty of the expected ingredients: violence, bloodshed, and the gangster grit that Scorsese’s moving cameras have been spreading across screens for years.

The Irishman may impress you as somber, particularly as the story nears its resolution. The feeling is reinforced throughout by Frank’s relationship with Peggy, one of his four daughters, played as an adult by Anna Paquin. She knows her father and rejects him. Forget the law. She's his judge.

Peggy and also time. Mobsters, union leaders, violent men, and blowhards are all subject to the same destiny. All of them eventually will die and be forgotten.

Frank doesn’t relish the idea. At one point, he talks to a priest. Frank is too honest to say he feels remorse. He says he feels nothing about the things he's done. One thing he does seem to feel — and De Niro’s performance reflects it — is a reluctance entirely to vanish. Frank wants his body housed in a vault because it strikes him as a little less final than burial or cremation.

It’s the last futile hope of a gangster, the idea that somehow he’ll be able to evade — if only by a shade — the one hitman that can’t be beaten.

Phoenix gets behind the make-up in 'Joker'

Dark, violent and brooding. Is this a comic-book movie or a shrieking cry for help?

Set in a decaying, rot-infested Gotham City, the Joker attempts to show what happens when society’s “invisibles” are pushed to the breaking point. Kicking fanboy comic-book nostalgia to the curb, Joker brings us face-to-face with the madness that festers beneath the surface of a corrupted society. If Joker were to have a subtitle, it might be: Joker: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

But wait. Am I talking about Joker, the villain who Batman has been fighting for years and who previously has been played by Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger and who now falls into the hands of Joaquin Phoenix? I am.

Joker, which marches to one of the year's most ominous drumbeats, was directed by Todd Phillips, whose resume includes such raucous comedies as Old School and the Hangover movies. Who knew that Phillips had this kind of haunting, violent and grime-encrusted effort in him?

But then Phillips never worked with Phoenix before and Phoenix, in many ways, is the movie — with everything else working to support the insanity, insecurity, and terror of an incomparable and frightening performance. I don't think it's stretching the point to say that Phoenix and Phillips have used comic book characters to create an anti-comic-book movie.

Having lost considerable weight to play the Joker — a.k.a., Arthur Fleck — Phoenix borders on the skeletal; he’s portraying a man who’s virtually disappearing. His occupation (clown for hire) puts him behind a mask that, at least initially, doesn’t liberate him but pushes him further into anonymity while also subjecting him to any number of cruel derisions.

Everything about Arthur screams misfit, including a disorder that causes him to burst into choking, maniacal fits of laughter that can appear indistinguishable from crying jags and which have no relation to anything that's happening to Arthur at the moment.

Mugged and severely beaten early on, Arthur is prey awaiting rebirth as predator. It’s not an easy transition for Arthur, who previously was institutionalized and who now lives with his mother (Frances Conroy) in a shabby Gotham apartment building, which he reaches by ascending a steep flight of punishing stairs.

Imprisoned in a child-like state, Arthur only escapes his loneliness when he’s violent. Arthur cares for his diminished mother, even washing her hair as he sits tubside over her nakedness. Hardly good preparation for developing mature relations with women.

I have no idea whether Phillips and Phoenix set out to make this kind of movie or whether it evolved as they began to work together. If the latter, they trusted their instincts and built everything around Phoenix's performance from Mark Friedberg's dystopian production design to Hildur Guðnadóttir’s musical score, which emerges from the screen like a moan, the sound of a soul being crushed.

Set in dingy apartments, dirty subway cars, and littered streets, Joker becomes a vivid, night-crawler of a movie in which its comic-book roots are only half-heartedly acknowledged, and perhaps didn't need to be there at all.

The movie introduces us to young Bruce Wayne, who, of course, will grow up to be Batman. Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen) is an imperious tycoon with contempt for the masses he proposes to save by becoming the city's mayor. He calls them "clowns."

All of this produces a movie that’s compelling in ways that challenge convention while also drawing on the movie past, most notably Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy. Not only has Robert De Niro, the star of King of Comedy, been cast as a talk-show host, but Arthur aspires to be a standup comedian, a pursuit for which he has no aptitude. He scrawls his idea of jokes into a notebook full of incoherent scribblings, hardly a manifesto.

Yet, when Arthur turns to violence — he shoots three drunken Wall Street types in a subway melee — his actions give rise to a social movement in which protesters don clown masks and shout down those who are rich enough to immunize themselves against the city’s rot.

The irony flows easily because Arthur has no interest in politics. He doesn’t want to change the social order; he wants to be seen, to bask in the limelight of an existence that's finally acknowledged and even celebrated. And, yes, Phoenix's performance also generates pity for this misbegotten figure.

Joker harbors one glaring false note. Arthur tries to form a relationship with a single mother (Zazie Beetz) whose attraction to Arthur challenges credibility. Arthur is too weird for this or any other relationship. Is Beetz's character's attraction to Arthur akin to the concern one might feel for an abused child? Whatever it is, it doesn’t ring true.

You probably know that Joker already has generated controversy. It won the top prize at the recently concluded Venice Film Festival but has been criticized for being too violent, for having the potential to cause violence and for encouraging facile enmity toward achievement and wealth.

On violence: Yes, the movie’s violent and, yes, it contains hints of brutal aggression toward its audience. It’s as if Phillips and Phoenix, with no small amount of defiance, want to challenge audiences to examine their love of villains and their taste for blood. They’re asking what happens if we strip away comic-book protections and show the real thing?

As a result, Joker brings its violence closer to us than most horror movies. Unlike in It Chapter Two, for example, evil isn’t something that recurs in 10-year intervals with supernatural assists; it’s lodged in the twisted psyche of the guy in the apartment next door. It's Taxi Driver's Travis Bickel reborn into a normless world.

Are the movie’s jabs at elitism and wealth justified or simplistic? Simplistic, of course, but don’t misunderstand. Joker isn’t a movie that's likely to inspire profound thoughts or discussions about its deeper meanings; it seems to want what its main character wants for himself, an inescapable and independent existence.

When Arthur fully emerges as Joker, he dances down those same steps that he climbed every day as he headed for his lonesome retreat. It’s a wild, uninhibited release of energy played against Gary Glitter's Rock and Roll, Part 2 -- and it's coming from a figure in clown make-up with a blood-red rictus drawn on his gaunt face.

That moment and others like it -- particularly when Phoenix incorporates dance into Joker's repertoire -- stand as unnerving bits of performance art: frightening, dangerous and eerie. It’s mad anarchy unleashed: terrifying and, in one harrowing moment, in charge. If that doesn't rattle you, I don't know what would.

De Niro tries his hand at stand-up

A movie about a comic that's neither funny nor illuminating.

If we didn't already have enough to be depressed about, we can add one more thing to this abysmal winter of teeming discontents.

Robert De Niro has made another movie that probably will disappoint those of us who've been waiting for a great, latter-day return to form from an actor whose recent choices sometimes feel like a betrayal of his talent.

In the new movie, The Comedian, De Niro plays Jackie Burke, a comedian who hit it big with a '90s sitcom. Haunted by the character he once played on TV and unable to build on his early success, Burke has turned into an embittered (and decidedly unfunny) stand-up comic who specializes in insulting any audience has the misfortune of becoming his prey.

Absent the thematic resonance and insight of De Niro's King of Comedy, The Comedian puts De Niro in an awkward position. It's not easy to believe that Jackie has anything resembling worthy comedy chops. We wonder, then, why we're being asked to watch him.

A script credited to Art Linson Richard LaGravenese and Lewis Friedman tries to put Jackie into a variety of situations that illustrate his desperation and persistence.

After a raucous incident in a nightclub, Jackie serves a month in prison followed by a stint of community service. During his community service he meets Harmony (Leslie Mann), a young woman who's also doing community service.

Director Taylor Hackford (Ray), who may be ill-suited to movies with a sneer, can't make much out of a relationship that doesn't really make sense -- at least in any way that isn't a bit distasteful.

We also are shown Jackie's relationship with his long-suffering but indulgent brother (Danny DeVito), a restaurant owner who serves as an ATM machine for the perpetually broke comic.
Patti LuPone portrays the brother's much less supportive wife.

Say this: De Niro's presence draws talent. Edie Falco plays Jackie's manager, and Harvey Keitel shows up as Harmony's father, a man almost as unpleasant as Jackie. Charles Grodin, Cloris Leachman and Billy Crystal appear in cameo.

The big joke that Jackie ultimately unveils centers on a parody of Makin' Whoopee. At a home for seniors in Florida, he offers his mock version entitled Makin' Poopy. Let's just say that this is not a moment of high wit.

It's daring, I suppose, to make a movie about a comedian who isn't particularly funny, but it's not clear whether the filmmakers understand that -- which only makes the movie more difficult to digest.

Jabs, no knock-out in this boxing pic

A split-decision on the latest boxing movie, Hands of Stone.

With a drastically exceeding hairline, a thinning crop of gray hair and an almost frail appearance, Robert De Niro finally gives a real performance as legendary trainer Ray Arcel in Hands of Stone, a quick-hitting biopic about Roberto Duran, the Panamanian champion whose career peaked in a ferocious bout with Sugar Ray Leonard.

Venezuelan director Jonathan Jakubowicz presents Duran's story in a series of punchy if familiar episodes. A hungry street kid acquires wealth in the boxing ring, falls into the bloat of dissolution, loses sight of what's important and only finds renewed purpose by realizing that he must once again put on the gloves.

Any director who decides to make a boxing movie inevitably must shadow box with some heavyweight movie history, recent efforts such as Creed and, for contemporary audiences, the touchstone: Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, which featured one of De Niro's greatest performances as boxer Jake LaMotta.

Jakubowicz may have thought that he was expanding the genre simply by focusing on a non-American boxer whose personality was formed in the mean streets of Panama. He also ties Duran's story to tensions between the US and Panama as Panamanians seethe with desire for true independence.

The story's arc generates enough momentum to make Hands of Stone watchable, but I'm not sure that Jakubowicz takes us deep inside Duran's story, which features a raw, energetic performance by Edgar Ramirez (Carlos) as Duran.

Ramirez leaves us with the impression that Duran was a man of recklessly expressed aggression, rage that stemmed from anger at a father who abandoned his family. As an impoverished kid, Duran was motivated by hunger, the kind that comes from missing meals. We're not talking metaphors here.

Much of the training provided by De Niro's Arcel involves trainer and boxer in a tug of war in which Arcel tries to persuade his charge that boxing involves more brain than brawn and that the best fighters employ strategy in their efforts. You need a plan for a fight that goes beyond jumping into the ring and letting the punches fly.

Arcel's approach often chafes against Duran's bravado and impatience, traits that allow him to win the love of a school girl (Ana de Armas) he meets on the streets and whom he sweeps up in a whirlwind courtship.

De Armas evolves from schoolgirl to embittered wife during the course of the movie with Jakubowicz eventually pushing the relationship into a furious, Raging Bull-style confrontation that suggests more than it delivers. It peters out quickly.

Subplots arise, but mostly come across as skimpy. John Turturro plays a New York gangster who wants to control the fight game. Ellen Barkin does what she can with a small and somewhat thankless role as Arcel's wife. With blonde hair and a thick voice, she might be taken for the embodiment of the Bronx, circa 1955.

Ruben Blades signs on as Carlos Eleta, a wealthy Panamanian who becomes Duran's manager. He handles the money end of Duran's career; Arcel does the training. Elena shoulders most of the blame for agreeing with promoter Don King (a credible Reg. E. Cathey) to a rematch that didn't allow the hard-partying Duran enough time to get himself back into shape.

Sugar Ray Leonard (Usher) comes across as a more stylized boxer who, at first, allows Duran to get inside his head. Duran insults Sugar Ray's wife with a crude taunt. It's all part of the fight game that culminates with a Las Vegas rematch in which Duran famously quit in the middle of the bout.

If you're hoping to come away with a greater insight into what made Duran throw in the towel, you may be disappointed. He knew he wasn't prepared? He didn't care? Winning the welterweight championship in the first fight diminished his drive?

It's reassuring to see De Niro give a full-bodied performance as a trainer with a clearly defined ethos about the sport of boxing. De Niro's scenes with Ramirez have real fire, and Ramirez makes you feel the burn in Duran's hunger.

So a split decision. Hands of Stone holds our interest, but never quite delivers the punch that would have made for a great boxing movie.

Maybe it's because we're in late August, but in the world of boxing movies, this one feels like an undercard bout i rather than a main event.

She mopped her way to success

Jennifer Lawrence shines. The rest of the movie? Not so much.

I've enjoyed the movies that director David O. Russell has made with an ensemble cast that capitalizes on the considerable talents of Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro. I was immoderately enthusiastic about both Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, which is why it saddens me to report that the third time is not quite a charm.

Russell's Joy, which showcases Lawrence, crosses the line from buoyant and bracing to marginal and disappointing.

First a word about Lawrence, who brings more than the required depth to the character of Joy Mangano, the woman who invented the Miracle Mop and built a small commercial empire around the kind of products that are pitched on channels such as QVC.

Mangano exemplifies the brand of entrepreneurial spirit and salesmanship that's required to reach shoppers armed with coffee cups in one hand and remote controls in the other.

But even Lawrence's performance, a mixture of discovery and determination in the context of a supremely dysfunctional family environment, can't quite overcome the weaknesses of an episodic script by Russell and co-writer Annie Mumolo (Bridesmaids).

On top of that, the rest of the cast doesn't always click, and that includes Cooper as head of QVC.

Russell's regulars are joined by Isabella Rossellini, perhaps miscast as a wealthy woman who dates Joy's divorced dad and finances Joy's early efforts. Virginia Madsen plays Joy's soap-opera addicted mother, a woman who seldom leaves her bedroom, and Diane Ladd appears as the grandmother who believes in Joy's exceptionalism.

Once again, Russell focuses on a chaotic family. De Niro's struggling character, has to move in with his daughter when his second wife gives him the boot. This means sharing the basement with Joy's ex-husband (Edgar Ramirez), a guy who fancies himself an up-and-coming singer.

Joy, who evidently takes in relatives the way others take in stray cats, soldiers on, sometimes arousing the jealousy of her half-sister Peggy (Elisabeth Rohm).

Pleasures pop up amid the story's clutter: Joy making her first awkward appearance on TV, for example. Or the way Rudy, no expert on relationships, criticizes his daughter for not having what he regards as a "proper" divorce.

But Russell too often gets wrapped up in the nuts and bolts of Joy's business, matters that -- at least in my book -- qualify as of minor interest. Did you know that the Miracle Mop, introduced at a price of $19.95, featured a 300-foot cotton loop that could be wrung out without actually touching the mop head? Do you care?

A late-picture introduction of legal troubles doesn't generate much suspense. We know Joy will emerge triumphant.

Moreover, the need to keep us rooting for Joy constrains any satiric bent that Russell might have brought to the world of home shopping.

Say this: Lawrence holds this somewhat scattered movie together, but it's Russell himself who raised the bar with two previous movies: This one doesn't quite measure up -- and I say that as someone who very much hoped it would.

It's definitely not in the bag

The Bag Man continues the apparently endless attempt to bring film noir back to life.

Enough.

I've had it with neo-noir, particularly when the attempt turns hollow and pointless, as is the case with the new thriller The Bag Man.

A battered-looking John Cusack stars as Jack, a hitman who's sent on a mission by a mysterious and apparently powerful man named Dragna (Robert De Niro). Jack's asked to travel to the Louisiana bayour, pick up a bag, hide out in room 13 of rundown motel, and wait for Dragna to pick up the bag. Jack will be richly rewarded for his efforts, but there's one catch: He's not allowed to look in the bag.

En route to the movie's less-than-surprising finale, Jack also must kill a variety of folks who are trying to kill him.

At the motel, he finds himself increasingly entangled with a woman named Rivka (Rebecca Da Costa), who may be plotting against him or who may just be an innocent bystander in Jack's murky drama that, too often seems to be trying to be weird only to establish some sort of strange bona fides.

The motel, for example, is managed by an unkempt and freakish looking man in a wheelchair (Crispin Glover).

Director David Grovic seems to be trying to leaven the proceedings with splashes of humor, but this dreary, derivative thriller can't compensate for Cusack's one-dimensional performance or for a story that gives us almost nothing about which we're able to care.

And the bag trick? We've seen this sort of thing before in Robert Aldrich's 1955 Kiss Me Deadly and in Quentin Tarantino's 1994 Pulp Fiction. Both Adlrich and Tarantino used it to better effect. Here, it's just one more detail in a movie of very little consequence.

Laughs slim in this mob comedy

De Niro, Pfeiffer and Jones. No, it's not a law firm; it's the cast of another superfluous Mafia comedy.

Unimaginative, far-fetched and unable to establish a consistent comic tone, The Family -- the story of the Manzonis, a mob family hiding in France -- feels as stale as a two-day old croissant.

Director Luc Besson's attempt to connect explosive violence with comedy doesn't exactly fizzle, but it's surely not as funny as the filmmaker, who co-write the script with Michael Caleo, must have intended.

The movie's main joke hinges on the fact that the entire Manzoni family has severe anger management issues. Insult mom (Michelle Pfeiffer), and she might blow up your business. Attempt to put one over on dad (Robert De Niro), and he'll try to beat you to death with a baseball bat. It doesn't take much kindling to bring the Manzoni temper to a violent boil.

The two Manzoni kids also seem to have inherited the mobster gene. Warren (John D'Leo) is a conniving high-school student and budding crime czar: His sister, Belle (Dianna Agron) shows no mercy when dealing with a male student who who makes boorish advances.

Safe to say that De Niro, behind a bushy beard, breaks little new ground. Pfeiffer, who made her mob-comedy bones in Jonathan Demme's 1988 Married to the Mob, makes a strong impression, but -- like her compatriots -- can't entirely overcome Besson's tone-deaf approach to humor.

Credibility is not the movie's strong suit. With a $20-million price on his head, De Niro's Gio Manzoni -- a mobster turned snitch -- has been assigned his own personal FBI agent (Tommy Lee Jones). And speaking of not breaking new ground, the always intimidating Jones once again does his "Mr. Severe" act.

The movie builds toward a violent finale that will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Besson's work (La Femme Nikta and The Professional), but the humor and violence tend to cancel each other out, and the whole project comes across as something that may have out-lived its shelf life even before the curtain rose.

Did we really need another comedy about the Mafia? Is it plausible that so many people would speak English in a dreary and obscure French town? Would the U.S. government really spend big money to send an FBI agent and two assistants to a small French town to protect the Manzonis from vengeful American mobsters.

At one point, Gio discovers a typewriter in the rubble around the rundown house the family has been given. He decides to write a book about his experiences. Maybe his memoir would have been more interesting than a comedy that tries to shuffle the mob-movie deck, but deals a losing hand.

A Philly-based romance to love

Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence create some of the year's best chemistry in Silver Linings Playbook.

Movies don't have to be perfect to be loved. It's a good thing, too, or we might never love anything that reached the big screen. Because it's a romantic comedy that spits in formula's eye, because it's built around winning performances and because it successfully mixes humor with a bit of edgy drama, Silver Linings Playbook deserves a big hunk of audience love.

From the movie's opening, it's clear that we've never seen Bradley Cooper (of Hangover fame) in this kind of role. In an early image, we see Cooper's Pat Solitano talking to himself. As the movie progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that Pat has lots of high-speed conversations bouncing around his head.

Pat, we also discover, is about to be released from a mental institution. He's in the up-cycle of a bipolar affliction, and somehow has convinced himself that he's going to find the silver lining in every cloud that has or ever will hang over him.

Pat was sent to the institution as part of a plea bargaining deal. Eight months earlier, he arrived home to find his English-teacher wife in the shower with a history teacher. Pat, a substitute history teacher, lost control and nearly beat the man to death.

Director David O. Russell's character-rich comedy distinguishes itself by throwing away both the romcom and mental-illness-drama play books as it encounters life's absurdities and celebrates its saving graces.

Pat's mother (Jacki Weaver) picks him up at the institution, and brings him home. Pat's father (Robert De Niro) is appropriately concerned about his emotionally tipsy son, a guy who's liable to erupt in anger when he hears Stevie Wonder's My Cherie Amour, the song he and his wife chose for their wedding.

Obsessively determined, Pat has one goal. He wants to win back his wife Nikki (Brea Bee), a task made more difficult by the restraining order that she has taken out against him.

I know. It may not sound like it, but Silver Linings Playbook is most assuredly a comedy, although it sometimes pushes the definition to a breaking point.

Hopes for Pat's recovery don't look particularly promising because he refuses to take his meds and because he's not entirely convinced that he needs to do anything more than stay positive.

He's also not keenly self-aware, which may explain why Pat jogs through his neighborhood in sweats covered by a plastic garbage bag. It has something to do with trying to lose more weight. Nikki thought he was getting too flabby. But a garbage bag?

As part of his battle plan, Pat goes on a reading jag: He tries to devour every book on the syllabus his English-teaching wife uses. He retreats to his attic room and reads Hemingway's Farewell to Arms. But rather than being moved by the book's powerfully sad ending, he's outraged. He wakes his parents at four in the morning to rant about the fact that Hemingway couldn't bring himself to write a happy ending for his story about love and war.

For Pat, nothing feels more urgent than whatever emotion he happens to be experiencing, whatever thought pops into his head. He's locked inside himself.

Based on a novel by Matthew Quick, the screenplay has more in mind than chronicling Pat's dissent into mental illness. At a dinner with old friends (John Ortiz and Julia Stiles), Pat meets his match, a young neighborhood woman (Jennifer Lawrence) with a slutty reputation and a penchant for honesty. For a while, it looks as if the screenplay is going to pit one against the other in a contest to see who's crazier, Lawrence's widowed Tiffany or Cooper's tightly wound Pat.

It takes an adventurous director such as Russell (Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings and The Fighter) to keep a movie such as Silver Linings Playbook from blowing up in its own face.

Russell doesn't shy away from some of the drama that's bound to be produced in a situation involving mental illness. The police are frequent visitors to the Solitano household. But he also has a firm grip on the comedy that's lodged in the Solitano family dynamic, and he gives the story an ample helping of Philly soul.

The story also introduces us to Pat's therapist (Anupam Kher); his older brother (Shea Whigham) and a variety of others; Chris Tucker plays a friend Pat meets during his eight month stint in the mental ward.

But the movie's beating heart belongs to Cooper and Lawrence, who create some of the year's most interesting chemistry.

Cooper never has been better; and Lawrence proves herself a sexy force of nature as a woman who (in my old neighborhood) would have been said to "have a real mouth on her."

De Niro excels as a compulsive and extremely superstitious Philadelphia Eagles' fan and part-time bookmaker; Weaver (familiar from Animal Kingdom) is fine as his long-suffering wife, a woman who generally tries to see things through the silver linings that her son says he hopes to find.

When I tell you that Silver Linings Playbook builds toward a dance contest (no, I'm not kidding), your guard rightly should go up. Trust me. This is not a typical, end-of-movie contest, and Silver Linings Playbook is no run-of-the-mill romcom.

You may find reason to carp about Silver Linings Playbook, but remember what I said at the outset: Love -- as Pat and Tiffany amply demonstrate -- is far from perfect. Still, there'd be a lot fewer movies, if we didn't believe that it beats the hell out of the next best thing.

Who said drugs make you dumber?

Not everything about Limitless adds up, but it's still great fun.

Sometimes, thought can be a movie's worst enemy.

If you think too much about Limitless - a new thriller about a pill that enables its takers to access every part of their brains - you'll probably fall headlong into a plot hole or find yourself puzzling over whether this or that action by its main character makes sense.

Not nearly as stylish or tricky as Inception -- kind of a distant cousin -- Limitless still manages to establish itself as more creative than the average March movie. Better yet, this energized, mind-bending fantasy doesn't stint when it comes to reveling in the sheer joy of winning. And, yes, it's generous about sharing the fun.

The set-up is plenty enticing. Eddie Mora (Bradley Cooper) is a New Yorker whose life is going nowhere. Eddie has a book contract, but hasn't written a word. He has an ex-wife (Anna Friel) he hasn't seen in years. His current girlfriend (Abbie Cornish) has pegged him as one of life's losers and is ready to move on. Eddie's tiny apartment is as much of a mess as his life.

One day Eddie bumps into his former brother-in-law (Johnny Whitworth). Whitworth's Vernon says he's working for a pharmaceutical company; he offers Eddie a pill that promises to change his life. Eddie initially resists, but eventually takes the pill.

Wham! Eddie's reborn. He cleans his apartment; he starts writing the novel that long had eluded him. He's off and running on a success track.

But wait....

The pill's effect, of course, wears off, leaving Eddie with a new and simple objective: Get more of the drug, which the movie calls NZT.

Cooper, familiar to most audiences from The Hangover, makes Eddie's transformation convincing as he blossoms into a guy who can master any task. Want to play piano? No problem. How about learning a new language? Ditto.

Eddie dispenses information with the precision of a guy throwing a great game of darts, and Cooper makes it clear that being super-smart is both fun and addictive.

Limitless also offers another bit of happy news. Robert De Niro does fine work as Carl Van Loon, a corporate giant who wants to use Eddie's abilities to analyze a pending mega-deal. It's great to see De Niro liberated from low-grade comedies such as the abysmal Little Fockers. Maybe there's something left in his tank, after all.

Director Neil Burger employs heady visual trickery to show Eddie's drug-induced state, and screenwriter Leslie Dixon keeps the proceedings lively by attaching a variety of twists to the main plot. At one point, Eddie gets crosswise with a Russian mobster (Andrew Howard). Later, he's implicated in a murder that's handled so hastily you may have forgotten it by the movie's end.

That's the trick: Limitless employs speed to great advantage. It moves quickly, encouraging us to enjoy the excitement of Eddie's meteoric rise, even as we wonder whether he can sustain his super-charged acuity. Limitless may not dot every "i" or cross every "t", but the filmmakers seem to be betting that they'll score enough points - including one bit that's guaranteed to leave an audience buzzing -- to keep us from over-thinking what we've seen.

I'd say they've succeeded.

Get the 'Fockers' out of here

It's difficult to imagine anyone approaching Little Fockers with anything but the lowest expectations. This latest edition to the series that kicked off in 2000 with Meet the Parents meets those low expectations -- and then some. * Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro reprise their roles as antagonistic in-laws in a story that begins when De Niro and Blythe Danner (as the Byrneses) visit their twin grandchildren for a fifth birthday celebration. * Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand (as the parents of Stiller's character) turn up to repeat old jokes; so does Owen Wilson, who plays one of Polo's former suitors. * Jessica Alba signs on as a flirtatious drug rep who asks Stiller's Greg to help sell Sustengo, a Viagra-like drug that leads to the expected (and predictably lame) joke about a long-lasting erection. * Harvey Keitel, who long ago starred with De Niro in Mean Streets, has a cameo role as a contractor who's working on a house that the Fockers are renovating. His presence serves only to remind us that just about everyone involved with this Focking mess might have made better use of their talents. * Whether little or big, the Fockers have worn out their welcome.

Butt-kicking galore in 'Machete'

OK, Machete, we won't ask you to text.
Three years ago, director Robert Rodriguez included a trailer for a movie called Machete in his portion of Grindhouse, the Rodriguez/Tarantino B-movie revel. The trailer was a spoof. The movie didn’t exist.

The spoof has become reality with the release of Machete, a full-blown, helping of butt-kicking, B-movie action. Rodriguez, who shares directing credit with Ethan Maniquis, serves up a hunk of grindhouse fare that has been amped-up and given booming production values that make you wonder whether it's possible to mix movies and steroids.

Can we think of this as a surprise? Hardly. Rodriguez's love for exploitation-style movies was apparent from the start. He kicked off his career in 1992 with El Mariachi, a super-cheapo riff on exploitation movies.

Like its predecessors, Machete mixes over-the-top violence, humor, severed body parts, beautiful women and growling machismo. But this particular concoction is designed to boot the guilty pleasure of the grindhouse into mainstream multiplexes. For me, the mainstreaming of cultish fare always diminishes its power, and Machete is no exception. These movies might have been funnier when the people who made them weren't looking for laughs.

The story revolves around an ex-Federale named Machete (Danny Trejo), a super-strong Mexican who knows how to wield his weapon. Trejo's Machete is thrown way off his game when his wife and daughter are murdered by a Mexican drug lord named Torrez (Steven Seagal with a Spanish accent). Machete crosses the border into the U.S., keeping a low profile until he’s drawn into a plot to assassinate a State Senator (Robert De Niro with a southern accent) who wants to build a border fence.

Linking the movie to immigration issues ultimately turns Machete into a Latino revenge saga aimed at all the folks who rail against illegal immigrants. Trejo, who has the kind of look that could frighten small children, makes an unexpected hero who must fight off drug lords, corrupt vigilantes and a mysterious political operative (Jeff Fahey).

As you can tell from De Niro’s presence, the movie is cast for fun. Don Johnson shows up as a ruthless vigilante who likes to shoot people who cross the border; Cheech Marin signs on as Machete’s brother, a priest who never will serve as a model for non-violent behavior.

Say this: Rodriguez understands his audience. There’s plenty of pulchritude, notably from Michelle Rodriguez, as a woman who runs a network that offers support to illegals, and Jessica Alba, as a customs agent who prefers justice to law and who enjoys jumping Machete’s bones. If that’s not enough to make macho pulses race, Rodriguez includes nude scenes from Lindsay Lohan, who plays Fahey’s character’s wayward daughter.

Note: Given her recent troubles, Lohan has turned into an instant sight gag, not really where any actress wants to be.

Most of the action has been engineered to draw whoops from the multitudes, including a signature line for Trejo’s character: “Machete don’t text.”

Of course, with this kind of movie, the violent envelope must be pushed: An escape scene involving a ropey strand of intestine provides what either can be regarded as a high or low point, depending on how much tolerance you have for gore.

Rodriguez seems to have achieved his goals here, but I’m more than a little tired of the adolescent humor and super-charged energy of movies that exult in their pulpy origins. Rodriguez is good at what he does in Machete, but I half wonder whether it's worth doing at all.