Space travels of an unlikely duo

    On its surface, Project Hail Mary sounds like another large-scale space adventure, a movie in which a lone traveler must save the Earth when a virus threatens to dim the sun. A mysterious microbe known as Astrophage is responsible for this doomsday scenario.

   Fortunately, Earth has hope for survival, albeit a slim one. The future of humanity depends on a molecular biologist -- Ryan Gosling's Ryland Grace -- traveling 11.9 light-years to Tau Ceti, a star that’s immune to Astrophage. Perhaps an antidote can be discovered and brought back to Earth. 

    It's a last-ditch, long-shot effort with no guarantee  of success, but it's the only option.

   Project Hail Mary directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse) shift away from the usual space-genre tone, bypassing ominous cosmic references and occasionally indulging in sentiment.

    Distinguished by its use of sets and avoidance of green-screen work, the movie has a down-to-earth flavor, even as it vaults toward a distant galaxy. The approach is in keeping with Drew Goddard's screenplay, which immediately confronts Grace with the series of problems that propel the story. 

   When he awakens from his induced slumber, Grace can't remember who he is or how he happened to find himself on a spaceship. Job one: Read the clues that will help him recover his memory.

    Grace seems an unlikely hero. The story begins with him teaching seventh-grade science, after having been rejected by scholars for advancing a thesis the scientific establishment scorned; i.e., that life needn't be water-based. Grace's brilliance was mocked.

     Eva Stratt (Sandra Huller) heads an international organization that recruits Grace for the Hail May Project. Eva admires the fact that Grace is willing to think unconventionally, even if others don't accept his conclusions. 

     So, Grace enters deep space, quickly learning that his companions on his voyage had failed to awaken from their induced sleep. He becomes the solo savior of his planet.

     Well, not quite.

      En route to his destination, Grace encounters an alien ship on which a creature he names Rocky also has been traveling.

     James Ortiz does the voice work for Rocky, filling the character with innocent charm and making the most of the way Rocky struggles to understand a new language, sometimes to comic effect.

   Grace's alien buddy may look like a leggy rock, but by no means is he as dumb as one. An engineer by trade, he builds a bridge between the two ships. Rocky, we learn, misses the spouse he left on his home planet; he, too, has lost his crew, and, like Grace, he has tried to adjust to being alone.

   The screenplay adds poignancy because scientists on Earth have equipped Grace's ship with enough fuel to reach its destination, but not enough for a return trip. (The ship, by the way, runs on Astrophage, an odd bit of irony.) Additionally, Grace must mourn the death of his fellow travelers (Ken Leung and Milana Vayntrub), both of whom he hardly knew.

     Project Hail Mary is based on a popular 2021 novel by Andy Weir, who also wrote The Martian, which became another big-screen space adventure built around loneliness and ingenuity. 

     By the time Rocky enters the picture, screenwriter Drew Goddard has begun employing flashbacks to allow Huller's character to develop and to provide additional insight into Grace's pre-flight life. Gosling carries the movie with ease in a showcase role.

     A set piece in which Grace and Rocky try to recover fuel is built for excitement, but other space shots lack the feeling of dark emptiness that can make life feel puny, meek, and insecure.

    Entertaining and involving -- if overly long at 156 minutes -- Project Hail Mary occasionally struck me as silly. Rocky, after all, isn't the most intriguing looking of creatures. I also found the cuteness of the movie's epilogue off-putting, making me think I'd witnessed an adventure that couldn't resist painting a smiley face on its intergalactic surface. 

     Still, Project Hail Mary offers relief from the interplanetary bloviation of other space epics, serving as an antidote to the self-seriousness with which Hollywood usually plies the depths of space. 

     The message also merits consideration: Forget Aliens and its many successors; other forms of life just might turn out to be our BFFs.

      

'Fall Guy' doubles down on action

 

   

     Love is in the air and so are many flying bodies in The Fall Guy, an action/romcom in which Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt generate plenty of chemistry. 

   Fresh from his Barbie turn as Ken, Gosling brings shabby appeal to his role as a top stunt man going through a rough time. Blunt responds as an ambitious movie director who can control a set but can't entirely manage her emotions.

   Romance aside -- and, in this outing, it too often falls from view -- The Fall Guy comes across like prep work for summer at the movies, a time when mayhem tends to turn plots into burdensome afterthoughts.

     I had hopes, though. The Fall Guy might have been an engaging look at the lives of stunt men, those stalwarts who create heart-stopping effects that rely on human effort rather than CGI manipulation. 

   Instead, the movie comes across as an over-amped serving of action. Its most arresting footage can be seen in the clips that accompany the end credits, snippets that reveal as much about moviemaking as the movie itself.

  The Fall Guy gets off to a good start with Gosling playing Colt Seavers, a respected stuntman who’s asked to repeat a stunt involving a dizzying fall. 

 Colt works as the stunt double for Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a high-profile action star whose ego has expanded along with the box office receipts he generates. Because he thought too much of Colt's face could be seen during the first attempt, Ryder demands a do-over.

   The second fall goes badly. Colt breaks his back. His pride and body wounded, he retreats into solitude that destroys his relationship with Blunt’s Jody Moreno, who at the time was a camera operator.

   Eighteen months pass and Colt, now working as a valet, is asked to travel to Australia to do stunts in  Jody's Metalstorm. She's making her directorial debut with an action-packed picture populated by aliens and the space cowboy who fights them. 

  But wait. The film’s producer (Hannah  Waddingham of Apple's Ted Lasso) summoned Colt without Jody’s approval. Jody's still brooding about how Colt gave up on their relationship.

    And so it begins. What, you ask? 

    A cluttered story that swamps the relationship between Colt and Jody in favor of stunts that spill over into the movie's "real-life" plot, which surfaces when Colt is asked to find Ryder. The moody star has disappeared.

    A former stunt man who directed Brad Pitt in Bullet Train and who has served as Pitt's stunt double, director David Leitch provides a bit of welcome information for movie fans.

    Leitch clues us in about cannon rolls, stunts in which cars are flipped. He breaks the rules by showing us, as the saying goes, how the sausage is made when Colt is flung against a rock after being set on fire. Wires yank other folks out of scenes, and we see the exhilaration generated by the timing and teamwork that accompanies the success of a complicated stunt.

   But, oh, that convoluted storyline. 

    I half wondered whether the movie that Jody films might have been more fun than the mystery the film revolves around; i.e., what’s really behind Ryder’s disappearance? 

   Leitch sets up the action in ways that are supposed to be funny; sometimes they are; sometimes they aren't — at least that’s how I saw it. I thought Leitch did a better job in Bullet Train.

     The Fall Guy delivers action while trying (vainly, I think) to poke fun at Hollywood’s obsession with stunt-and-grunt moviemaking.

    The result: a noisy, sometimes battering mashup of romance and action that shortchanges the former to serve the latter. For all its stunts, flash, and glamor, The Fall Guy feels undernourished, a blaring helping of commotion sans much of anything resembling sustenance.

Barbie faces an existential crisis -- really

 

     Imagine a world in which Barbie (yes, that Barbie) suddenly begins thinking about death. What if dark thoughts intrude on Barbie’s otherwise bright and shining life?

     But wait. You don't have to imagine such a scenario. Director Greta Gerwig has done it for you.

     Part satire, part pop-cultural celebration, and part cheering session for feminist assertion, Gerwig's Barbie tries to accomplish a neat trick -- at least as far as its audience is concerned. 

    The movie attempts to please the adoring legions of girls who grew up playing with Barbies while also taking a bite (a soft one to be sure) from a satirical apple.

      Whatever it's about, Barbie derives much of its comic kick from the pink-hued work of production designer Sarah Greenwood and costume designer Jacqueline Durran. They create Barbieland, an aggressively happy place that might be the best thing the movie has to offer.

      Two star turns help keep the movie spinning. Margot Robbie makes a smiling Barbie whose perfect life unravels when she begins having unwanted thoughts and (oh, the horror!) her beautifully arched feet turn flat.

      Working a high-beam smile and allowing an occasional lonely teardrop to roll down her face, Robbie slips into full Barbie mode. 

    Ryan Gosling plays Ken, the male doll who, at the outset, lives only to bask in the warmth of Barbie's gaze, a role that’s bound to breed discontent.

    Written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, the story eventually takes Barbie to the real world of Los Angeles where she tries to find the girl whose thoughts plunged her into existential crisis. There’s evidently an emotional link between the Barbies and the girls who play with them.

    Ken tags along with Barbie but eventually returns to Barbieland, where he tries to establish his stilted idea of patriarchal government, ousting Barbie president Isa Rae and engaging in parodic muscle flexing. He becomes the ultimate poseur. 

      Barbie remains in LA for a while, eventually meeting and fleeing from Mattel executives -- led by Will Ferrell -- who want to put her back into a box -- literally.

       Hey, if you’re looking for subtlety, you’re in the wrong place.

       When a fleeing Barbie finally returns to Barbieland, she's accompanied by humans. America Ferrera plays a former Barbie enthusiast, a Mattel employee who travels to Barbieland with her skeptical teenage daughter (Ariana Greenblatt). 

      Robie's Barbie describes herself as Stereotypical Barbie, which suggests she's not alone. Barbieland is home to all manner of Barbies, some representing various stages of the doll's evolution.

         Ken isn't alone either. A multitude of Kens inhabit Barbieland.

         Kate McKinnon plays Weird Barbie, an exile in Barbieland who fell out of favor when someone played too hard with her. 

         Gerwig works overtime to incorporate meaning into this pink bauble of a movie. Does Barbie inspire girls to be more than smiling dolls?  Is she a product of the male quest for dominance, an unattainable role model to which no girl can measure up? Can the human world coexist with heavily marketed merchandise? 

         In some ways, Barbie is nothing more than a dressed-up sketch that wants to have it both ways, treating Barbie as a pop-cultural heroine and as a satirical object in a story that argues that young women must create identities free of commercial and social influences. 

         Another way to pose the question: To be plastic or not to be plastic?

         Gerwig finds enough laughs to keep anyone from trying to plumb any depths or wonder whether the plot makes any sense at all. 

       Enough. You've probably read that Barbie ends with a one-liner that gives the film its sharpest kick. It does.

       

       

         

        

 

The story of the moon landing

Director Damien Chazelle avoids cliches in First Man, a carefully calibrated look at an epic event.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of director Damien Chazelle’s First Man arrives in the form of a reminder: Great feats often begin with baby steps that stutter, shudder and sometimes go terribly wrong.

To establish the point early, Chazelle opens the story of NASA’s 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the moon with Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) taking a bone-rattling ride on a 140,000-foot test of an aircraft that’s meant to approach the edge of the atmosphere. Armstrong, who later will become the first man to set foot on the moon, encounters a malfunction but pushes through.

The sequence serves as a powerful overture for a movie about the early days of space flight. By today's standards, men were riding in vehicles that look fragile, almost jury-rigged. They were putting their lives on the line to break barriers and extend humanity’s reach — and not everyone thought space exploration was a great idea. A costly US space program was pitted against pressing domestic needs and a rising chorus of protest against the Vietnam War.

Chazelle evokes the tumultuous political atmosphere of the ‘60s, but doesn’t dwell on it nor does he sound triumphant chords about space achievement. He doesn't glorify the NASA astronauts who risked and sometimes lost their lives in pursuit of the moon landing President John F. Kennedy had chosen as a national goal.

Moreover, the movie doesn’t have a standard-issue hero.

As played by Gosling, Armstrong comes across as an emotionally reticent man who seems only able to survive by pulling a curtain across the pain that stemmed from the death of a daughter from cancer. He sheds tears when he’s alone, but doesn’t talk about the loss with his wife (Claire Foy), his sons or his friends.

A stand-out scene finds Armstrong removing himself from a gathering after the funeral of a fellow astronaut. Alone in his backyard, he scans the skies through a hand-held telescope, pushing away a concerned colleague by telling him that he's not standing alone in the night because he's looking for a conversation.

With Armstrong training, traveling and immersing himself in his work, it falls to Foy’s Janet to hold down the homefront. She does, but Foy never turns Janet into the loyal wife of cliche. She supports her husband, but she’s also angry in the way of many wives of the '60s, women who were left to tend to chores while their husbands found adventure in the workplace.

Of course, there was one key difference between Armstrong and the legions of overworked office slugs: Armstrong risked not coming home from his workplace.

And that’s the Armstrong we meet here, a no-drama guy who regards what he does as “going to work," a job.

You may want to think of First Man as a "space procedural." Chazelle takes us through the various stages of development of a moon landing that began with the Gemini program and culminated with Apollo.

To make clear the dangers at hand, Chazelle includes the cockpit fire that took the lives of White, Gus Grissom (Shea Whigham) and Roger Chafee (Cory Michael Smith), three astronauts who died in a fire during a “plugs out” test of the spacecraft.

Naturally, the moon landing becomes the movie's climax. Chazelle handles the moment Armstrong stepped onto the moon with exquisite balance. He doesn't italicize its awe or underplay it.

When the Eagle touches down on the moon, Chazelle allows the silvery expanse of the lunar surface to speak for itself, so much so that the movie goes silent. I confess to disappointment when — after some minutes of sobering silence — Justin Hurwitz’s score began to chime in.

Ryan's controlled performance makes us wonder whether the actor opened a tap and drained out three-quarters of his emotional life. That could be exactly what Chazelle had in mind. We come to understand that Armstrong performs with cool equanimity when he's able to keep a lid on anything that might break his concentration.

It may be fair to say that the movie — based on a book by James R. Hansen — finds its meaning in the choices that Chazelle doesn’t make. He takes a neutral path that mirrors Armstrong's personality. That’s not to say that the movie is without emotion or tension, but it’s not buoyed by an identifiable point of view, a limiting factor. That, an overly long running time and a slight whiff of sentimentality keep the movie from greatness.

Still, First Man struck me as a far more ambitious and worthier work than either Whiplash or La La Land, two of Chazelle's previous movies.

Chazelle has been criticized for not showing the moment when Armstrong planted an American flag on lunar soil. Please. I took the omission as a significant part of Chazelle’s approach. He wants us to see the Apollo mission fresh, to avoid the kind of signature images that have degenerated into cliche.

As if to emphasize work-a-day life in the space program, Chazelle also refuses to celebrate the hotshot pilot ethos that made The Right Stuff so engaging. Only Corey Stoll’s Buzz Aldrin approaches his job with bravado and public expressions of ego. It’s not something that Chazelle dwells on.

At two hours and 15 minutes, the movie's tension and single-minded determination become a bit of a grind, so much so that the lunar landing generates more relief than excitement. I don't mean that as a criticism. When the Eagle lands, the movie relaxes.

I’m one of those people who believe the US benefits from a strong and adventurous space program. First Man reminds us that no such program can be risk-free and leaves us to ponder whether the rewards are worth the risks.

Decide for yourself, but wouldn't it be grand to see the world again focused in awe and appreciation at an accomplishment that really had the power to expand the way we see ourselves? I'm not holding my breath, but sometimes a little dreaming helps.

A visually rich return to the future

What's real and what's not? Blade Runner 2049 wants to know, but it may cause some head scratching..

I'm not one of those people who consult director Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) for philosophical guidance. I liked the movie well enough when I first saw it, but haven't joined the cult of enthusiasts who make regular return visits, often followed by heated debates about what, in the movie, should be taken as real and what shouldn't.

But there's no question that Scott's movie -- based on Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep -- set the pace for a lot of the dystopian sci-fi that followed in the wake of Blade Runner's noir-flavored foray into a dangerously decaying Los Angeles.

Now comes Blade Runner 2049, set some 30 years after the original. If you're looking for a beautifully realized vision of the world as the filmmakers think it might exist several decades from now, this new edition -- directed by Denis Villeneuve (Arrival) -- works hard to provide it.

Major credit accrues to cinematographer Roger Deakins, who makes ample use of yellow and orange hues to create a world that feels as if its enveloped in poisonous smog. Breathe at your own risk.

The desiccated landscapes of the movie's early going tell us that the world has been drained of its richness, its abundance having been exploited to the point where even a dead tree has become something a novelty. Technology may hold sway, but the Earth has become infertile.

We also learn, from opening title cards, that replicants -- genetically engineered creatures that are indistinguishable from humans -- are designed to be safe and servile. But Blade Runners, those who hunt down and "retire" replicants, still operate, searching for older replicants that had the audacity to make a case for replicant self-determination.

Prior to a screening, publicists read a statement asking critics not to reveal plot points and other surprises. OK, I'm not going to talk much about the plot except to say that it's not always easy to follow the one concocted by writers Hampton Fancher and Michael Green. I'd say that 2049 wants to be a deep-thinking detective story with a replicant hunter named K (Ryan Gosling) sent on a quest to ...

I won't say more, except to note that replicant-related peril puts the entire structure of the society Villeneuve depicts at issue.

Among the film's creations, you'll find Joi (Ana de Armas), an electronically produced holographic woman that adores K and offers no resistance when it comes to fulfilling her role as a fantasy. You'll also see Jared Leto as the head of a company that produces replicants in a performance that's too transparently spectral and weird. Leto's Wallace is served by a ruthless woman (Sylvia Hoeks) who's all business -- and bad business at that.

Even icier than she is on House of Cards, Robin Wright portrays the LAPD big-wig to whom K reports.

Gosling punctuates a purposefully inexpressive performance with small inflections, and -- if you've read anything about the movie -- you know that Harrison Ford returns as Deckard, only in a more worn-out version. The replicant hunter of the first movie evidently has been in hiding for the last 30 years, taking up residence in an abandoned Las Vegas casino where he can watch holographic Elvis projections and we can ponder a few similarities to the work of Stanley Kubrick.

The movie, which has its longueurs, perks up considerably when Ford arrives. I should tell you, though, that most of the time, I found myself in a state in which I seemed to be floating through the story, not really caring where it was going as I awaited the next intriguing bit of visual invention.

In his positive Hollywood Reporter review of 2049, Todd McCarthy astutely pointed out that the "style and tone" of 2049 owes more to Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker) than to Scott's original. McCarthy's observation is correct but I wonder whether this approach -- creating an almost expanded sense of time -- doesn't deprive the picture of narrative interest while threatening to turn 2049 into a massive art project with a vision that exists more to be dissected than actually lived in. Food is now produced synthetically. As in the original, cars fly. High tech paraphernalia can be found even in the seedy tenement in which K lives. The ravages of climate change create snowfall in Los Angeles. When Leto's Wallace presides over a room in which a platform is surrounded by water that splays ripples of reflection across walls.

That's another way of saying, Villeneuve doesn't give us much reason to connect emotionally to much of anything in 2049.
I suppose 2049 serves up plenty of fodder for those who wish to philosophize about what's real and what isn't or to ruminate on how artificial intelligence changes our ideas about what it means to be human. But after the movie's sometimes taxing, 164-minute running time, I found that other more immediately pressing needs required attention.

Music and romance in 'La La Land'

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone star in an attempt to breathe new life into the Hollywood musical.

I liked it, OK? Now, let me tell you why the much-praised La La Land didn't totally lift my spirits, change my mood or otherwise transport me to heights heretofore unattained in the history of human movie watching. And, no, I'm not talking about some post-election funk that prohibits me from enjoying anything.

For me La La Land is a bit of an oddity, a movie I enjoyed (some of it immensely) and also quibbled with (often).

Director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) opens the movie with a dance number staged on an LA freeway exit that sets a snappy pace that defines the movie in its earliest going. Scenes feel carbonated, as if they're about to bubble off the screen.

The single-shot camera work of the movie's opening proves fun in a razzle-dazzle sort of way, but if you look at other elements (the music and the dancing), you may be slightly less impressed. La La Land feasts on candy-colored imagery and an unashamed reckoning with its musical predecessors.

La La Land centers on a romance between aspiring artists -- one a jazz-obsessed pianist (Ryan Gosling), the other an actress (Emma Stone) who has yet to make her mark in Hollywood.

Watching Gosling and Stone do a Rogers/Astaire-like number on a deserted street overlooking the city's lights proves a bit of a strain. They're both trying their best, but I've seen Fred Astaire and ... well ... you know how the rest of the sentence goes.

Of the two stars, Gosling seems the least likely to turn up in a musical. He's playing a character who dreams of restoring a jazz club in Los Angeles, and he's written a song for piano that becomes one of the movie's major motifs. Sorry to say, the tune sounds trite when compared to Gosling's character's purported heroes: Bird, Coltrane, et. al.

Eventually, Gosling's Sebastian is presented with the opportunity to join a successful band led by former pal Keith (John Legend), a musician who embraces a youthful audience and thinks that Sebastian's devotion to jazz might be a bit pointless.

By this time, Gosling's Sebastian and Stone's Mia are a couple; she urges him to join Keith's touring show, but in the end, regrets having encouraged him. She thinks Sebastian has sold out his art, and betrayed his avidity. Who's left to defend the purity of jazz?

Stone's Mia faces her own struggle. She finds herself humiliated at audition after audition, familiar scenes handled with aplomb by Chazelle. Sebastian encourages Mia to write a play, and stage it as a one-woman show. She does. No one comes. She heads back to her home in Nevada, but eventually achieves her dream, and becomes a star.

Will the romance between Mia and Sebastian survive all this career angst?

While pondering that question, you'll find trace elements of Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, Vincent Minnelli and Jacques Demy. But even if you don't catch the references, you'll get the feeling that Chazelle wants to meld old-fashioned movie magic with an upbeat sensibility that can play to contemporary audiences.

The stars of the movie are production designer David Wasco, art director Austin Gorg and cinematographer Linus Sandgren, whose work affords considerable pleasure in quiet sequences in which Stone's Mia simply walks down a dimly lit street or in a fantasy sequence set at Los Angeles's Griffith Observatory, which you'll recognize as a centerpiece location in Nicholas Rey's Rebel Without a Cause.

Chazelle uses the observatory's planetarium for the movie's most fanciful and charming sequence, which offers a helping of gossamer enchantment that can't help but make you smile.

Don't be surprised if Stone wins the best actress Oscar for her work here. To the extent that the movie has a true beating heart, it emanates from Stone, who has been given a showcase musical number -- a song that she pulls off with more conviction than vocal talent.

The movie's bittersweet ending isn't entirely satisfying, but we have La La Land, and it's possible to like it without totally surrendering to all of its carefully concocted charms.

A comic look at the road to ruin

Terrific performances, biting wit and insight make The Big Short one of the year's best movies.

The weird thing about The Big Short is this: At some point you realize (as do some of the movie's characters) that you're rooting for a group of guys to make a financial killing, but you also know that their success means the whole economy will tank.

So watching the movie leaves you feeling elated, dejected and angry in quick succession, which, I presume, is precisely what director Adam McKay intended when he adapted Michael Lewis' book about the devastations caused by the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market.

I've read criticisms of McKay's movie that focused on the fact that it's entertaining without being infuriating enough.

Maybe so, but I think McKay's effort has a different value: It focuses on the insanity that drove the mortgage market prior to 2008 when the bottom fell out. When confronted with this kind of damaging absurdity, we're tempted to think that two choices manifest: We either laugh or sink into the deepest of funks.

But McKay and a very able cast offer a third alternative: We do both -- and we applaud the efforts of a filmmaker who rips the mask off a brand of stupidity and greed that may not entirely have disappeared just because the economy has improved.

Now, the chances are pretty good that a whole lot of people don't really understand what happened with sub-prime mortgages. If someone asked you to define a CDO (collateralized debt obligation) could you do it? Same goes for a credit default swap.

Charles Randolph's screenplay goes a long way toward explaining such financial instruments, sometimes interrupting the movie's narrative flow with brief lectures from celebrities such as Margot Robbie, seen in a bathtub speaking directly to the camera. Anthony Bourdain and Selena Gomez also chime in.

At first, you wonder what the hell these people are doing in the movie, but you quickly realize that McKay has decided to make the necessary explanations as diverting as possible before returning to a story that's driven by terrific performances.

The tone is set early when Ryan Gosling appears as a Deutsche Bank hotshot who intermittently serves as our cynical guide through the story.

Christian Bale plays Michael Burry, a former MD who wears T-shirts and shorts at work, walks around his office barefoot and sometimes sits at desk beating a pair of drumsticks against his thighs. Burry's the genius who actually peeked inside the packaging and re-packaging of mortgage-backed securities and realized that they were built on air.

Given enough time, Burry knew the whole structure would collapse, which prompted him to set about inventing a mechanism to bet against a mortgage market that most regarded as rock solid.

Then there's Mark Baum (Steve Carell) a New York hedge fund manager with a conscience. When Gosling's Jared Venentt insists that it's time to bet against mortgages, Baum voices skepticism. So does his team.

Baum seems to combine two traits that can make life difficult for an ambitious investor: He wants to make money, and he also wants to view himself as an ethical player.

When Baum and his team tour Florida's devastated luxury housing market, they hardly can believe the mortgage bankers they encounter, guys who are more likely to sprout wings than develop anything resembling a conscience.

At a conference in Las Vegas, Baum meets with another wheeler-dealer. Again, he can't believe what he's hearing from a supposed maven. It may be a rationalization on Baum's part, but he convinces himself that these smug idiots deserve a comeuppance. He's more certain than ever that it's time to sell short.

But in what may be his best performance yet, Carell makes it clear that Baum won't be laughing all the way to the bank. He's genuinely worried about the pain the economy will suffer.

Those familiar with Lewis' book quickly will note that McKay has made alterations. But the gist is the same: For a time (and who knows if that time truly has ended) the economy was based on fraud, greed and a near-total disconnect from reality.

The economy became paper, and, in the end, wasn't worth what it was printed on.

And then there's Brad Pitt. Pitt has a very nice turn as Ben Rickert, a guy who made a fortune, turned his back on Wall Street and retired to Boulder.

A couple of newbies (Finn Wittrock and John Magaro) discover that they'd be smart to bet against all the phony/baloney mortgages. They convince the reclusive Rickert to help them move from the kids' table to the one where the high rollers sit.

Pitt's Rickert believes this duo, which sometimes provides straight-ahead comic relief, but he also tries to educate them: If they win, the world loses.

And, yes, before it's done, The Big Short reminds us that ordinary people suffered because of what the big boys did.

So don't bet against The Big Short. It's an exuberant, smart and pointed reminder that much of what we believe about the economy takes place in a world of smoke and mirrors.

When the smoke clears and the mirrors break, it's people like us who are left wondering what wrong. The Big Short wants us to know.

Fathers and sons in Upstate N.Y.

The Place Beyond the Pines has powerful moments, but doesn't always add up.
Just about anyone who sees director Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines should agree that Cianfance is a talented and ambitious filmmaker. Cianfrance's third feature -- a look at three generations of men in downtrodden Schenectady, N.Y. -- has moments that pulsate with the energy of a filmmaker driven to infuse his story with vividly realized life.

If you had a chance to meet Cianfrance (as I have on several occasions dating back to 1998), you'd know that he's a principled filmmaker who tries (and often succeeds) to wring hard-won truth from every moment in this films.

Co-written with Ben Coccio and Darius Marder, Cianfrance's latest movie has plenty to recommend it, even though it can't quite match the ambition that went into creating what the director calls a "triptych," a look at the impact of fathers on sons in three loosely related acts.

The movie's shortcomings can be attributed to a bit of imaginative depletion in its second act, to a casting misstep in its third, and, perhaps to a generalized over-emphasis on authenticity of milieu, sometimes at the expense of enduring insight.

That's not to say that Cianfrance's achievement is negligible. There's enough good work in The Place Beyond the Pines (the Mohawk name for Schenectady) to make it a worthy follow-up to Cianfrance's widely praised Blue Valentine. For the most part, Cianfrance finds ways to encourage his cast to plunge headlong into risky emotional terrain.

Like Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines benefits from the presence of Ryan Gosling, who this time plays Luke, a heavily tattooed motorcycle stunt rider who -- during an annual visit to Schenectady with a carnival -- learns that he has a son with a woman (Eva Mendes) with whom he had a fling.

With the movie's bravura opening shot, Cianfrance makes it clear that Luke's life is going nowhere. We follow Luke into a metal cage where he rides his motorcycle in circles, a death defying carnival stunt that serves as a metaphor for a life of trapped fury.

When Luke learns that he has a son, he quits the carnival and commits himself to taking care of the boy, a task for which he's ill-suited.

At a loss about how to function in "normal" life, Luke's future changes when he meets Robin (a scary Ben Mendelsohn), a mechanic who introduces Luke to the fine art of bank robbery. Luke enters banks, robs them and speeds away on his motorcycle. He eludes police by driving his bike into Robin's waiting truck, and disappearing from the roads.

Cianfrance, who likes to work in comfort-shattering close-ups, keeps this section of the movie percolating, right up until its violent conclusion.

This portion of movie benefits in no small part from Gosling's trademark edginess, as well from strong work by Mendelsohn (familiar from the brilliant Australian neo-noir Animal Kingdom). Equally good are Mendes and Mahershala Ali, who plays the man who lives with Mendes's Romina. Unlike Luke, Kofi has more than fantasy ideas about how to care for a son.

The movie's second section features a strong performance by Bradley Cooper, most recently seen in Sliver Linings Playbook. Cooper, who made Beyond the Pines prior to Silver Linings Playbook, plays a Schenectady cop who becomes a DA and who later runs for the office of New York attorney general. A confrontation with Luke brings him into the story.

Bradley's good, but the movie loses imaginative steam as it immerses itself in what seems an overly familiar story about police corruption that features an appearance by a menacing Ray Liotta, who portrays Deluca, a cop who introduces Cooper's Avery to the world of corruption.

In this second segment, the screenplay raises issues of betrayal, ambition and guilt that don't break much new ground, but allow Cianfrance to sustain a mood of encroaching dread.

Some of the late-picture problems result from a crucial piece of miscasting. In the third act, Emory Cohen portrays Avery's son AJ, a high school kid who has adopted the linguistic style of a wannabe gangsta. It's not easy to believe that he's the son of an aspiring politician and of his mother, a minimally seen Rose Byrne. Cohen's performance proves distracting enough to undermine some of the movie's credibility.

Cianfrance does better with Luke's son, played by the gifted Dane DeHaan, who you may have seen in a segment of HBO's In Treatment. DeHaan captures the turmoil of a high school kid who's beginning to confront difficult truths about his family history.

It would not be fair to say that The Place Beyond the Pines unravels in the late going. But it can't afford the loss of credibility that accompanies its melodramatic and somewhat self-conscious conclusion.

Cianfrance can't entirely sustain the movie's intensity over its two hour- and 20-minute length, and the screenplay probably could have benefited from a healthy dose of nuance. I hope, by now, you've gotten the point: The Place Beyond the Pines is far from perfect, but when Cianfrance connects, he tends to connect in a big way.

Heavy gunfire, but 'Gangster Squad' misses

A great cast can't salvage and over-stylized look at LA crime in the late 1940s.

Sitting through Gangster Squad is a bit like watching a bad Brian DePalma movie, maybe a low-grade version of The Untouchables. I felt cheated. If I'm going to watch bad De Palma, I'd prefer that it be directed by De Palma rather than by Ruben Fleischer , best known for 30 Minutes or Less and Zombieland.

Perhaps because he's dealing with so many familiar elements, Fleischer relies heavily on style to spiff up the story of a small squad of LA cops who use rogue methods to take down famed gangster Mickey Cohen. Gangster Squad, we're told at the outset, was inspired by a true story, but the movie's shamelessly enhanced dramatic oomph made me wonder whether inspiration hadn't trumped accuracy.

According to the movie, Cohen attained so much power in post-war LA that he threatened to take control of the city, a feat he accomplished by showering the police and select judges with equal amounts of bribery and threat. In defiance of the Chicago mob, Cohen also attempted to corner the market on all West Coast bookmaking. He might have succeeded, too, had it not been for the Gangster Squad, a group of LA cops who worked deep undercover, never receiving credit for their efforts.

In telling what could have been a rewardingly sleazy LA tale, Fleischer and screenwriter Will Beall put a lot of second-rate dialog in the mouths of many thinly drawn characters. The movie is so pulpy, the Tommy Gun blasts practically scream out for "blam! blam!" exclamation points.

If you've read anything about Gangster Squad, you already know that the movie was scheduled for earlier release, but was delayed because it once contained a shooting scene at the famed Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Not surprisingly, such a scene (now gone) seemed in poor taste after the Aurora multiplex shootings, although I wonder if it would have been in any better taste had that execrable bit of real-life violence never occurred.

Offensive levels of violence aside, Gangster Squad represents a significantly wasted opportunity, mostly because Fleischer has assembled an impressive cast.

A sneering Sean Penn plays Mickey Cohen. Josh Brolin leads the Gangster Squad of the title. He's joined by Ryan Gosling, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Pena, Robert Patrick and Anthony Mackie, all of whom play cops recruited to put Cohen out of business.

That's a strong enough roster to make the movie's by-the-numbers script even more distressing. It's like asking a professional all-star team to play pick-up games in the park.

Emma Stone joins this heat-packing boys' club as Cohen's girlfriend, a woman who falls for Gosling's character, a jaded cop who doesn't sign up for the Gangster Squad until he sees an innocent shoe shine boy gunned down in the streets. Hey, even the most cynical cop has his standards.

The Gangster Squad is formed when the LA police chief (a bearish Nick Nolte) decides that the only way to topple Cohen is to fight fire with fire, an idea as unoriginal as the way I've just expressed it. Nolte's William Parker encourages his squad of renegades to step outside the law and wreak havoc on a Cohen empire built on profits from prostitution and gambling. Essentially, this means that they smash a lot of furniture, kick in doors and stuff like that. When they're about to shoot a bunch of bad guys, they say things such as "Light 'em up."

Fleischer seems to have encouraged over-the-top acting, particularly from Penn, who turns in one of his least interesting performances as the rapacious, sadistic Cohen. Fully embracing Cohen's darkest impulses, Penn makes the gangster seem so repulsive, you wonder why his own men don't bump him off.

There's no skimping on violence with the number of bullets almost matching the number of cliches in a script that scrambles film noir and western conceits while making a feeble attempt to raise an embarrassingly obvious moral question: Is it OK for cops to turn to savagery in pursuit of a good cause? Adjustment issues faced by World War II vets -- notably Brolin and Gosling's characters -- receive short, simplistic shrift.

Little about the dialog is subtle or nuanced, so the actors are forced to work awfully close to the surface. Brolin rages; Gosling does cool; Ribisi (as the 1940's-style techno geek) raises issues of conscience; Patrick acts as if he's just wandered in from the set of a B-western; Mackie remains calm under fire; and Pena is stuck in the tag-along role.

Fleischer may have wanted to make a movie in which everything comes across as pure and unadulterated -- a clash of boldly drawn big-screen archetypes. It mostly doesn't work, and Gangster Squad earns its stripes as the year's first disappointment. I suspect it won't be the last.

A sad-sack loses his soul mate

Steve Carell joined by a talented cast in Crazy, Stupid, Love

Steve Carell looks like a guy many of us might have gone to school with at some point or other. Carell, who made his big-screen breakthrough in 2005's The 40-Year-Old Virgin, is neither impossibly handsome nor off-puttingly strange? His movie characters sometimes have a sad-sack quality, but can seem entirely normal -- in a middle-of-the-road sort of way. Not a comic who likes to poke a finger in anyone's eye, Carell wouldn't seem out of place on line at a Home Depot store.

An improbable leading man, Carell's comic skills nonetheless have made him a headliner, and his latest comedy -- Crazy, Stupid, Love -- surrounds him with a moderately successful mixture of relationship issues, rom-com cliches and better-than-average farce.

In Crazy, Stupid, Love Carell plays Cal, a married man whose wife (Julianne Moore) tells him she wants a divorce. After a 25-year-marriage that began with a middle-school romance, Cal and Moore's Emily probably are together more out of habit than love. To seal the divorce deal, Emily confesses to an affair with one of her office mates, an accountant played by Kevin Bacon.

Once rejected, Cal slips into full-blown depression. He also becomes an unlikely regular at an upscale singles bar, where he's the proverbial fish out of bottled water. At the bar, Cal meets Jacob (Ryan Gosling), a slick womanizer who decides to give Cal a makeover. Jacob wants to turn Cal into a mirror image of himself, a smooth operator and certified play-ah. This is what's known in the trade as a necessary contrivance, a development that allows the movie to continue and gets Hal off his bar stool.

Crazy, Stupid, Love is a movie composed of meanwhiles, perhaps too many of them. Cal emerges as a love machine, and his eighth-grade son (Jonah Bobo) falls for his baby sitter (Analeigh Tipton), a girl who's four years ahead of him in school. Bobo's Robbie embodies the movie's major theme, which has to do with finding one's soul mate and pursuing him or her without fear of appearing either crazy or stupid.

In yet another "meanwhile," a young woman (Emma Stone)* rebuffs Jacob's advances; she's busy studying for her bar exam. But when Stone's Hannah is slighted by an attorney (Josh Groban) she assumes has fallen for her, she seeks out Jacob in what amounts to an expression of defiance and anger. Of course, Stone's Hannah falls for Jacob, and, of course, he suddenly realizes that there's more to life than sexual conquest. He's in love, too.

Jacob and Hannah close their love deal in a very amusing comic scene that pokes well-deserved ridicule at the final dance sequence of Dirty Dancing with its Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes rendition of Time of My Life. Last seen in the gritty Blue Valentine, the talented Gosling avoids turning Jacob into a caricature. Moore seems a little worn out in an underdeveloped role. An outgoing Stone, with her "I'll-try-anything" attitude, plays well against Gosling's cool.

I laughed at Marisa Tomei's increasingly broad portrayal of the teacher who becomes Cal's first conquest, and who lives to regret it.

Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (I Love You Phillip Morris) work their way (not always successfully) through the variety of tones in Dan Fogelman's hit-and-miss screenplay. Still, a first-rate cast and a couple of well-staged comic high points push Crazy, Stupid, Love into the plus category. You'll have to make up your own mind about a sentimental, end-of-movie speech that threatens to turn Carell into the Jimmy Stewart of love.

Did it warm my heart? Not really. Carell and Moore never convinced me that they were soul mates. Still, when Crazy, Stupid, Love magnifies a comedy of misunderstanding into moments of giddy farce, it comes awfully close to fulfilling the whacky mandate of its title.

*When initially published,I incorrectly called Emma Stone, Emily Stone. My bad.

A marriage gone hopelessly wrong

Director Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine is fueled by raw emotion.

In Blue Valentine, director Derek Cianfrance does what director John Cassavetes sometimes did: He pushes his actors toward what feel like breaking points, putting them in emotionally charged situations and allowing them to claw their way out – or not.
This look at both the beginning and end of a blue-collar marriage contains moments so potent they seem to put the movie’s principal actors – Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling – at emotional risk. For much of the movie, Williams and Gosling are suspended in the uncharted waters of a turbulent present that neither of their characters fully comprehends.

Cianfrance does this by shattering the usual narrative flow of a story. He shows us the beginning of the relationship and its end, omitting the middle. He also avoids smooth transitions from one time period to another, allowing scenes from the past and present to bump against each other in ways that take some adjustment, and – at least in the early going – create mild confusion.

At heart, Cianfrance’s movie is about two people who enter marriage with totally different expectations. Gosling’s Dean believes it’s possible to be thunderstruck by one woman, so much so that he’ll decide he must spend the rest of his life with her.

Obstacles don’t necessarily matter to Dean. He’s working for a moving company in Brooklyn. Cindy – the woman who ignites Dean’s passion -- lives in Pennsylvania. He knows nothing about her, and she knows nothing about him. No matter; he’s got a feeling.

Besides being hopelessly naïve, Dean’s approach causes him to ignore a lot of warning signs, and puts him in an awkward position: Once he achieves his goal, there’s nothing left. He’s without aspiration.

For scenes set in the present, Gosling has trimmed his hair to create a receding hairline and put on weight. Six years into marriage, Dean is contented being a house painter. His idea of a relationship-renewing experience involves checking into a tacky motel in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, getting drunk with his wife and spending the rest of the evening having sex. He knows the motel is silly, but doesn’t care. He’s ready to enjoy the silliness.

Dean’s life plan might have worked, except for one thing. Cindy no longer shares it, if she ever did. After being charmed by Dean, who has an unashamedly goofy streak, she marries him in a moment of weakness and need, a psychological state suggested by plot details best discovered in a theater.

When we first meet them, Cindy and Dean are already on the downside of their marital arc. They live in Pennsylvania. Cindy works as a nurse for a doctor who bolsters her self-esteem. She’s beginning to wonder whether she can get more out of life. Dean plays with their daughter Frankie (Faith Wladyaka); he works; he drinks beer; he’s living his dream; Cindy’s living his nightmare.

In one of the earliest scenes, the fully clothed Dean has fallen asleep in a living room chair, where he’s presumably spent the better part of the night. Frankie is out looking for the family’s missing dog. Cindy remains in bed. Clearly, the family is not operating with the greatest possible synchronicity.

Both Williams and Gosling face difficult challenges. A movie such as Blue Valentine demands that its actors respond with what must appear to be unrehearsed immediacy. Each character has been given some history, but Williams and Gosling pretty much are disconnected from the logical supports traditional narratives provide.

This can be powerful, but it also can look strange and a touch unconvincing. When Dean courts Cindy with a ukulele, he croons a silly version of You Always Hurt the One You Love, and asks her to dance to it. They’re on the street, tucked into the entranceway of a small store in her Pennsylvania hometown. The moment has wacky charm, yes, but it’s also self-consciously dippy.

And when Dean – during another courtship segment – tries to force Cindy to tell him a secret, he climbs over the railing of a fence on the Brooklyn Bridge, presumably threatening to leap if Cindy doesn’t reveal her secret. Gosling has said that he climbed the fence, waiting anxiously for Williams to capitulate so that he could come down. Two actors challenging each other to see how far each will go generates a certain kind of theatrical excitement, but it doesn’t necessarily equate with believable behavior.

The sex scenes in Blue Valentine are explicit, and initially resulted in an NC-17 rating, since overturned to give the movie an R, which seems more in line with the content and context that Cianfrance establishes. “R” is the right rating, and Blue Valentine certainly is worth seeing – for its performances, for the nearly palpable -- if sometimes strained -- commitment to truth seeking that seems to underlie every scene and for the director’s willingness to condense the narrative in hopes that he’ll find something essential.

Maybe it’s just this: Once someone checks out of a marriage, the relationship is doomed. Cindy pretty much has given up on Dean. She’s sold her emotional stock in the relationship. Poor Dean. From that point on, all he can do is make matters worse.

Class, madness, murder: A family story

When charm curdles, so does the marriage. So what does it mean when the wife disappears?

It's immediately interesting that All Good Things is the first dramatic feature from documentary filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, known to movie audiences for the mesmerizing Capturing the Friedmans, which told the story of a Long Island child molestation scandal. * Jarecki, whose provocative documentary proved that he knew something about dysfunctional families, turns his attention to another strange collection of relatives in this generally interesting take on a story based on the life of Robert A. Durst, heir to a New York real estate empire. Durst was convicted of a slaying in Texas, and more to the movie's point, was suspected of murdering his wife Katie, who disappeared in 1982. * Jarecki has attracted a powerful cast to his dramatic debut: Ryan Gosling plays David, the character based on Durst. Frank Langella portrays his businessman father, and Kirsten Dunst portrays Katie, a young woman who initially is charmed by David, but who increasingly becames frightened of him. * The movie takes its name from the health food store that David and Katie open in Vermont during the early days of their marriage. But David eventually is lured into daddy's business, which has its shady aspects and which seems to bring out the worst in him. * Gosling appears in Blue Valentine, a much better portrait of a troubled marriage, but he gives his usually effective performance, and Dunst makes us understand Katie's conflicted attitude toward her husband. * Jarecki uses the movie to speculate about what happened to Katie, and he does a nice job illuminating class distinctions between Katie and the family into which she marries. But the movie's sum never exceeds the strength of its parts, and All Good Things winds up an also-ran in the plethora of year-end releases that's spilling over into 2011.

The advantages of being organized

A dual blast of conscience -- feminism and unionism -- in a feel-good movie from Britain.

Made in Dagenham is an easy movie to knock. Predictably designed to create feel-good vibes in its intended audience, the movie stands as a prime example of the kind of British cinema that wears its social conscience on its sleeve. * I hadn't thought of myself as belonging to the group that cherishes such movies, but I must admit that Made in Dagenham's pro-labor stance gave me a lift in these days of high unemployment and rampant corporate profit. * Director Nigel Cole (Calendar Girls) may not be the most nuanced of filmmakers, but he employs a strong cast and benefits from the easy union of dual causes: unionism and feminism. * Focusing on a 1966 strike at a Ford plant in Dagenham, England, the movie tells the story of women who demanded the same pay scale as the plant's male work force. * Sally Hawkins, familiar from Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky, plays Rita O'Grady, the leader of the strike who must battle the male hierarchy of her union, as well as a recalcitrant Ford management.* Bob Hoskins portrays a union official who encourages the women, and Daniel Mays appears as Rita's mostly supportive husband. * Perhaps to show that feminist causes cross class lines, the script introduces us to Lisa (Rosamund Pike), the wife of a plant manager who sides with the workers. * Hawkins ably holds the movie together. Look, too, for a nice turn from Miranda Richardson as Barbara Castle, a government official who meets her match in Rita. * Yes, Rita has the entirely expected assortment of colorful co-workers, and, yes, the story isn't exactly loaded with surprises, but Made in Dagenham harkens back to a moment when we could derive good feelings from expressions of solidarity, as opposed to overwrought individual triumphs.