Diverse cast moves into 'House of Gucci'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the rest of the cast .... 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I settled on “all of the above.”  

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

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

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

Too many ‘Eternals’ spoil this Marvel brew

      I saw Eternals a couple of weeks ago and instantly was struck by the inappropriateness of the title. Eternals? By the time I reached the parking lot, much about this overstocked comic book of a movie had faded into the hazy vault of dispensable memory.

    About those Eternals. Each of them is endowed with a power that can be employed to save humans from monstrous, water-dwelling creates known as Deviants. In a reasonably engaging prologue, we learn that the Deviants were defeated centuries ago by the Eternals but now have returned to make the world Deviant again. 

   Er, no, they don’t really have a slogan.

    The major news about Eternals takes us behind the camera. The movie marks the superhero debut of director Chloe Zhao, best known for the Oscar-winning and, in my view, somewhat over-rated Nomadland. 

   Watching a director with respected indie bona fides take the helm of a giant cinematic cruise liner breeds its own level of fascination — not to mention questions about whether two oppositional movie streams can co-exist.

   I’m not sure Eternals answers the question, but it left me with two thoughts: Congrats to Zhao for securing what I hope was a major payday and for orchestrating a complex narrative.

   Unfortunately, that narrative too often challenges coherence.

   Zhao works with a diverse cast of characters in pursuit of big-screen thrills. Brian Tyree Henry plays a gay Eternal with a husband and a son; Kumail Ali Nanjiani, Don Lee, and Gemma Chan add to the mix. Salma Hayek portrays an Eternal with authority over the other Eternals.

    Zhao shows that she can muster up impressive visuals. Some scenes look as if they might have been inspired by a John Ford Western, and there are references to Kubrick’s 2001. Other pulpy sights accompany this skewed mashup of mythological references.

    Although there are ten Eternals, Chan’s Sersi comes closest to being a central character. Sersi tries to organize the unruly Eternals into defeating the Deviants, which also means saving humanity.

    As the temperamental Thena, Angelina Jolie crops up from time to time, perhaps to remind us that she’s in the movie.

   Nanjiani brings sparks of life to the proceedings as Kingo, an Eternal who has become a Bollywood star. 

   Lia McHugh appears as Sprite, a character of perky annoyance.

   A love affair between Chan’s Sersi and Icarus (Richard Madden) adds a melancholic note while showing us that not all the Eternals are committed to truth, justice and the American way. 

   Oops. Wrong franchise.

   Eternals is another product of the Marvel universe, which seems to be striving to be infinite, a never-ending galaxy of movies and characters. 

   Eternals may be the first superhero movie in which two men kiss and scenes in which dialogue dominates can be found. But Externals also wobbles under an expository burden that operates like tow ropes on a fractured narrative. 

  Moreover, a two-hour and 37-minute length can feel as if it might be an acknowledgment of the ages of the Eternal characters. Zhao has made a long movie that feels long.

   I know I’ve omitted some of the Eternals and I should say that the movie might have been fun had the Eternals done nothing but show up at key points in human history, which is what early scenes promise.

   If we’re lucky, Eternals will be a one-off. But don’t count on it. When Marvel makes a mess of a movie, it also drops seeds that seemed destined to sprout in some future multiplex harvest. 

   Besides, critics have little choice when it comes to the ongoing Marvel parade, so it pays to keep an open mind.

‘Like a Boss’ is like a comedy — only less so

Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne team in a comedy of low risk and little imagination.

I worry about Tiffany Haddish. Since her hilarious movie breakthrough in 2017's Girls Trip, Haddish's career has — to use the vernacular — blown up. In addition to the new comedy Like a Boss, Haddish has several movies on tap, not to mention Black Mitzvah, a Netflix comedy special that’s currently playing.

So what troubles me? Just this: I hope that the movies can find a better fit for Hasddish than the wearying January release that I’m about to review. She’s funny. She can command the screen and she has acting chops. She deserves a showcase that transcends sub-sitcom level screenwriting.

I wouldn’t call Like a Boss a personal setback for Haddish, but — to put it bluntly — there’s a reason why the movie is slipping into theaters in January, a time of low big-screen expectations as awards expectation focuses on last year's releases.

As the first movie I've seen in 2020, Like a Boss sank me into a New Year’s funk. Here is a movie in which neither cast nor audience is being asked to go anyplace worth going, a waste.

Directed by Miguel Arteta, Like a Boss tells the story of two women: Haddish’s Mia and Rose Byrne’s Mel. Friends since middle school, the two women share a house and run a make-up company with two employees: Billy Porter and Jennifer Coolidge. Dubbed Mia and Mel, their company is on the verge of hitting the financial skids. Could an acquisition offer by a major cosmetics firm be the godsend they need?

Her hair died red, Salma Hayek portrays Claire Luna, the brash head of the cosmetics company. A ruthless entrepreneur, the cartoonish Luna obviously can’t be trusted. She walks through her lavish offices carrying a golf club, presumably in case a need to smash something should arise.

The script contrives to have the eager-to-please Mel and the fiercely independent Mia turn on one another as they try to figure out how to work for the dictatorial Luna, who threatens to take over their company and kick the both of them to the curb.

As high-concept premises go, this one’s built on shaky scaffolding that turns the movie into a low-grade formula job in which the only real energy comes from Haddish’s often ribald one-liners. Both Haddish and Byrne try their hands at physical comedy but the movie’s display of comic imagination operates at dismal levels. Witness the inclusion of a passé karaoke scene, jokes about pot, jokes about the male and female nether regions and a gag about an overly seasoned Mexican dish.

The actresses seem to be straining to bring comic life to the material. They're game, but no amount of make-up can cover the screenplay’s witless inadequacies.

Mel and Mia are committed to helping women bring out their inner glow, an ironic message for a movie that has no inner glow of its own and which is built around two characters who have been conceived by filmmakers who were unwilling to take even the slightest of risks with them.

So fingers crossed for Haddish going forward. Rose, of course, has her strengths. But the talented Haddish has no need for a sidekick and Like a Boss has even less reason to command much attention.

Racing the clock to build a data pipeline

The excitement of obsessive ambition leads us to a familiar place in The Hummingbird Project.

The Hummingbird Project takes aim at obsessive ambition, in this case, the drive to gain the upper hand when it comes to buying and selling stocks by using high-speed data transmission to win milliseconds of advantage over the competition. For a while, the movie barrels along with dizzying urgency.

In addition, the movie gives Alexander Skarsgard (familiar from HBO's True Blood and Big Little Lies) an opportunity to shave his head to play a bald computer geek who can code his way out of just about any problem. Skarsgard’s Anton isn’t much when it comes to socializing, though. His stooped slouch of a walk makes you wonder whether, all things considered, he wouldn't be happier if he could simply disappear.

He can't. Skarsgard's Anton Zaleski must find a way to shave minuscule amounts of time off high-speed fiber optic transmission from Kansas to New York. The idea originated with Anton's cousin Vincent, played by Jesse Eisenberg in another avid performance.

You don't need an advanced degree to know that the movie is going to find ways to critique the driven world of high finance, but along the way, you'll find nice work from Salma Hayek, her hair turned stylishly gray, and Michael Mando, familiar from Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. Mando portrays the manager of the construction firm charged with building the data-carrying pipeline.

Although we've seen it before (principally in The Social Network), it's fun watching Eisenberg play a wheeling, dealing character.

But acting and character development isn't the problem here; the excitement generated by Vincent's scurrying personality eventually wears itself out, and we know from the start that the movie wants us to understand that there's more to life than making money.

Director Kim Nguyen, who also wrote the screenplay, finds himself a little behind the curve when it comes to tackling hollow, soul-destroying ambition, a theme that's spelled out so clearly that one of Vincent's conflicts pits him against an Amish elder (Johan Heldenbergh) who doesn't want to sell drilling rights on his land because he doesn't give a damn about speed.

The scene emphasizes a point that doesn't need underining: Speed can kill.

The bicker, they kill. That's the movie

Medicore Hitman's Bodyguard breaks little new ground.

In The Hitman's Bodyguard, bickering buddies shoot lots of people amid a flood of explosions, car chases and other forms of visual mayhem. There's also ample use of the "MF" word and a mounting pile of action sequences that have been edited to create a feeling of maximum frenzy.

The buddies in question are played by Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson, two stars who have branded their big-screen personalities to the point where it's almost impossible for either of them to do anything unexpected.

Reynolds can be smart in the glib way of characters created by snark-capable writers. Jackson does variations on the savvy, profanity-spewing killer who eventually reveals a moral foundation for his seemingly reprehensible actions.

Watching Reynolds and Jackson go through their standard motions provides most of the pleasure in The Hitman's Bodyguard, an action comedy that tries to blast its way through the brick wall of late summer indifference.

The title pretty much tells the story. Reynolds portrays Michael Bryce, a bodyguard whose A-list career shatters when he fails to protect an important client from assassination. Reduced to second-rate protection jobs, Michael basically hangs around waiting for the plot to arrive.

The story kicks in when Jackson's Darius Kincaid turns up. Imprisoned for being a hitman with hundreds of kills, the notorious Kincaid makes a bargain with Interpol. If he testifies against a vicious Belorussian dictator (Gary Oldman), the authorities will release Kinkaid's equally lethal wife (Salma Hayek) from the Amsterdam prison where she's being detained.

At various points throughout, Hayek's Sonia is seen terrorizing her cellmate, exposing her cleavage, and trying to make up for limited screen time by contributing her own carload of profanity to the movie's "R" rating.

Elodie Yung plays Amelia Roussel, an Interpol agent, and Michael's former lover. She promises to help Michael regain his status as a high-priced bodyguard if he'll agree to escort Kincaid from prison to the Hague, where Oldman's character awaits trial for crimes against humanity.

You don't need to be a genius to know that the trip will leave many bodies strewn in its violent wake or that credibility takes an early hit.

After taking a bullet in his knee, Kincaid limps through action sequence after action sequence with the movie stopping for occasional flashbacks to explain how Kincaid met Hayak's character or how Michael developed a relationship with Yung's character.

Director Patrick Hughes (The Expendables 3) seems to buy into to the theory that all action should be edited into fragmented shards, and the incessant banter between Reynolds and Jackson provides little that would make Oscar Wilde envious.

There's not much else to say about this formula job, which never rises above genre mediocrity, but may satisfy those who find this sort of rampant destruction appealing.

One raunchy 'Sausage Party'

This hunk of adult animation earns its R rating.

When I tell you that the animated movie, Sausage Party, involves walking, talking hot dogs and buns, you don't have to work too hard to surmise that the humor will be sexual and that it won't be subtle.

That's not to say that the splashy, adults-only animation in Sausage Party is not without trace elements of wit or that some of the jokes aren't funny, providing you're not put off by a slew of "F" and "MF" bombs that are thrown around so casually, they seem like accepted parts of speech.

And when I tell you that the villain in this ribald piece is a character named Douche (Nick Kroll), you should have all the information you need to know that Sausage Party is brash, impolite and damn proud of it.

Brimming with ethnic stereotyping and building toward an orgiastic finale that would be rated NC-17 if it didn't involve grocery store perishables, Sausage Party tells the story of hot dog Frank (voice by Seth Rogen). Frank falls for a bun named Brenda (Kristin Wiig). Frank and Brenda lust for one another, but can't do anything about their desires until they're liberated from their respective packaging.

The movie's characters give you some idea of what directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon have in mind.

In addition to Frank and Brenda, we meet Sammy (Ed Norton), a bagel who sounds very much like Woody Allen, and Lavas (David Krumholtz), an Arab hunk of pita who believes that eventually he'll be rewarded with 77 drips of extra virgin olive oil. I didn't even mention Teresa (Salma Hayek), a taco shell and Latin bombshell with lesbian leanings.

Sexual preferences aside, Sausage Party also immerses us in a story about the way faith functions to keep folks under control. The perishables at Shopwell, the supermarket where the story takes place, believe that when they're purchased they'll find eternal bliss in what they call "The Great Beyond." After being wheeled out of the store in shopping carts they'll be eternally happy.

Not so fast, says Honey Mustard (Danny McBride), a return item who has seen The Great Beyond, and knows that his perishable brothers and sisters will be sliced, diced, boiled, fried and otherwise "murdered" by hungry humans.

We follow some of the characters into The Great Beyond, notably little Barry (Michael Cera), a hot dog who hasn't grow to full size and who learns the horrible truth: The faith on which Shopwell runs is hokum.

Perhaps in a spirit of fairness, the screenplay also includes some non-perishable items, most prominently Firewater (Bill Hader), a native American bottle of liquor whose wisdom seems to derive from massive inhalations of marijuana.

Come on, you thought you'd make it through this kind of movie without a pot joke?

I don't know what it says about me, but I laughed at the wad of gum (Scott Underwood) that rides around in a wheel chair and talks in a voice that resembles the electronically produced voice of physicist Steven Hawking. Gum, we learn, became smart because he spent years stuck under the desk of a brilliant scientist.

Too much? Probably, but Sausage Party thrives on tossing out too much of everything.

In the right crowd, Sausage Party might be fun. It may not run out of energy, but it does sometimes run out of comic gas, and it's not always fall down funny.

By the time, the big orgy arrives, I'd had enough, which made me wonder whether Sausage Party's hour and 29 minutes might have been better had it been served as a snack rather than a full-course meal.

Oliver Stone gets his groove back

Savages takes a blistering look at the drug trade.

If you didn't already know that it's a bad idea to get crosswise with a Mexican drug lord, Oliver Stone's Savages will deliver the message in bold, gut-kicking fashion. Author Don Winslow's 2010 novel of the same name has provided Stone with a cornucopia of ingredients that he definitely knows how to cook.

Spilling over with sex, violence and ill-gotten luxury, Savages is Stone's best work in a long time, a movie that tells a vivid story that pretty much keeps Stone off his soapbox.

The action revolves around three characters. Chon (Taylor Kitsch) is a former Navy SEAL who runs a thriving marijuana business along with his parter Ben (Aaron Johnson), a brainy Berkeley grad with a social conscience. Ben uses some of his money to help folks in Third World countries.

Chon and Ben live with Ophelia (Blake Lively), a woman who goes by the name of "O" and who narrates this seductive story of crime and corruption. Both men sleep with "O," and both profess to love her. She insists she loves both of them. It takes two guys to make a whole man for "O" -- or so she says.

Stone wisely surrounds the movie's young leads with a veteran supporting cast that includes Salma Hayek (as a drug czarina); John Travolta (as a corrupt DEA agent); Benicio Del Toro (as a brutal mob enforcer) and Demian Bichir (as a well-dressed executive in Hayek's crime network).

The trouble starts when Hayek's Elena decides that she's going to take over Chon and Ben's business. She's attracted to this California duo because they've cultivated the best pot in the U.S., marijuana known for its killer THC count.

Ben, who's had enough of the drug business, is ready to sell. Chon wants to hold onto the enterprise they've built. Besides, he's convinced that no involvement with Mexican drug lords comes with insurance: It only can end badly.

If there's a certain amount of callowness among the movie's younger actors, the old pros compensate. Looking thick as a side of beef and sporting a close-cropped hair cut, Travolta is both funny and appalling as a rogue DEA agent; Del Toro's turn as the quietly vicious Lado follows suit; it's, by turns, chilling and amusing; and Hayek brings power-hungry bitchiness to new levels of steely-eyed intensity as Elena.

The rest of the plot involves kidnappings, torture and a level of brutality from which Stone never shrinks. Think of it this way: When drug lords decide to "punish" someone, they're not talking about spankings or slaps on the wrist. The squeamish should know that the movie includes beheadings and a scene in which a suspected rat is doused with gasoline and burned alive.

I don't know if there's a larger point here, although we can't help noticing that the drug trade couldn't thrive without massive police corruption and wanton violence.

Stone and cinematographer Dan Mindel balance the bloodshed with the rich light of Laguna Beach, where Chon, Ben and "O" reside. They also do a fine job of pointing out how luxury contrasts with squalor, depending on where characters fit on the drug-trade ladder.

Some of the dialogue is burdened by a phony, pulp toughness that rings hollow ("You don't charge the world, it changes you") and some of it is bitingly funny. I can't cite the movie's best darkly funny example without including a spoiler, so you'll have to take my word about the amusing part.

You'll find many of Stone's trademark visual tricks, but this time, he's letting the story do most of the work, and Savages is better off for it. Put another way: The movie is good enough to make you forget all about Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Even an overly tricky finale (bound to annoy some viewers) can't cancel the pleasures of this robust, sensual and unashamedly scabrous movie.

The real fun of Savages springs from the movie's pungency, from Stone's bravura handling of its violent set pieces and from his insistent acknowledgement that the dark side doesn't necessarily disappear just because the California sun is shining.