Monday, September 23, 2013
More than any of us can bear
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This review originally ran on this blog on Aug. 9, 2006. I'm re-posting it for The Oliver Stone Blogathon occurring through Oct. 6 at Seetimaar — Diary of a Movie Lover
By Edward Copeland
I finally caught up with Oliver Stone's World Trade Center and, as indicated by many reviews, it certainly qualifies as the least Oliver Stone-like film Stone has made (though Oliver can't resist tossing in a couple of ghostly images of Jesus in a light but hey, at least it wasn't a mystical Indian). World Trade Center does end up being Stone's best work in quite some time.
Like most Stone movies, it contains fat that could be lost easily and in the battle of 9/11 movies, I still prefer United 93, even though Stone's film contains good performances. Cage gives his best straight performance in ages. Yes, I loved him in Adaptation, but I can't remember the last time he played a dramatic role in a movie that wasn't a time-waster.
He's also ably supported by Michael Pena as the fellow Port Authority officer trapped with him beneath the rubble, and Maria Bello as Cage's wife and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Pena's wife, awaiting word on their husbands' fates. If I prefer United 93 to World Trade Center, it's for one main reason: the emotional wounds of 9/11 remain so fresh, that it seems almost unnecessary to tell personal, albeit true, stories to wring emotion from a viewer. The relative anonymity of the passengers depicted in United 93 touched me more deeply than the fleshed-out stories in World Trade Center did, especially when they tack on a lapsed paramedic (Frank Whaley) and a former Marine (Michael Shannon) who abandons his office job, throws on his old uniform and marches into Ground Zero to help.
World Trade Center depicts well the confusion and communications breakdowns on 9/11, where the first responders themselves don't realize that a second plane has hit the second tower until well after they've arrived on the scene of the first tower.
As you expect from a Stone production, his production team delivers top-notch technical aspects. While World Trade Center as a film comes off as Stone's finest in ages, it's difficult to compete with the real images we saw that day. Paul Greengrass found a way to accomplish that in United 93. While Stone's film offers good performances, somehow the personal touch ends up being less emotionally satisfying.
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Labels: 00s, M. Gyllenhaal, Maria Bello, Michael Shannon, Nicolas Cage, Oliver Stone
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Thursday, February 03, 2011
When you go from well-off to jobless
By Edward Copeland
One side of the economic meltdown that the media didn't cover very well (Who am I kidding? The media didn't cover any of it well.) was the plight of a certain segment of the newly unemployed, namely those making six-figure salaries and above who found themselves suddenly jobless. Sure, some Americans couldn't pay for prescriptions and groceries, but other victims weren't able to pay dues at country clubs and had to give up golf! Now, I may sound as if I'm mocking them, but the film that tells their story, The Company Men, does evoke some sympathy for its upper class characters occasionally, but it never leaves your mind that there were and remain people much worse off than these men lamenting the loss of expensive meals and fancy toys.
The Company Men marks the feature writing-directing debut of John Wells, best known for his television work as executive producer on such hits as ER and The West Wing, and the movie does have a bit of that efficient set-it-up and wrap-it-up flavor of those series about it.
The movie focuses on three executives at GTX, a giant transportation corporation: Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck), a 37-year-old v.p. account executive; Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper), a 30-year veteran of the company who started there when it was just a small shipbuilding operation and he was one of the builders; and Tommy Lee Jones as Gene McClary, one of the very top executives, but no longer the one who makes final decisions despite the fact he started GTX in the first place.
The film opens with the ultraconfident Bobby bouncing into work one morning, expecting to find a usual day only to feel some tension and a request to see a higher-ranking exec, Sally Wilcox (Maria Bello), right away. When he gets to the meeting room where she's waiting, he learns she's there to present him with his severance package — he's one of 200 getting the axe that day. They also are closing shipbuilding operations in two cities.
This news does not go over well with Gene when he returns from a trip where he's given blunt answers when asked about the outlook for GTX's future earnings prospects. When he's back in the Boston headquarters, he learns of these developments from a worried Phil, who fears he'll be on the chopping block soon and he's too old to start over. Gene demands to see Sally immediately and finds her in a meeting with other top executives, including the chairman and CEO and supposedly Gene's "best friend" James Salinger (Craig T. Nelson).
Salinger takes Gene out to talk privately and harangues him for making such a public scene, especially since he needs to accept that shipbuilding may have launched GTX, but it's a losing proposition now and they have to concentrate on their divisions that make money such as health care (how a transportation company expanded into having a health care arm seems odd and goes unexplained) to please shareholders. Gene feels betrayed, because he felt Salinger was his friend and waited purposely until he was out of town to make these moves.
Bobby doesn't take his firing well and acts with quite a bit of arrogance in the beginning when he's not immediately in the running for jobs with similar salaries and he's not ready to give up his lifestyle, until his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) basically forces him to face that reality. Early on, it's hard to have much sympathy for Bobby as he yells and whines with indignation about how he has an MBA. Later, when he lashes out at his son and tells him he's busy and to go play on his XBox, I almost had to stifle a laugh when his wife informs him that boy returned the video game machine because he knew they were having money problems. Hope he kept that receipt. How long had they had it? It felt like a scene got cut somewhere, but still...oh, the sacrifice.
Bobby has to make a bigger sacrifice than his son when he finally drops his pride and goes to work for his brother-in-law Jack at his small construction company. It's not the huge drop in pay and the manual labor that puts Bobby to the test, it's that Kevin Costner plays Jack, using the same awful New England accent he couldn't pull off in 13 Days and that still sucks now. Why does Costner insist on trying to do accents and, more importantly, why do directors let him ruin even small parts of their movies by letting him do it? It isn't as if Costner's status as s superstar remains what it once was, so surely they can no to him. Hell, since he doen't have that pull anymore, why are they hiring him in the first place, accent or no accent?
The usually reliable Cooper really gets the most thankless role (actually the second most thankless after Bello) in the film. From the moment Phil Woodward appears on screen, you can predict his entire story arc. Wells' dialogue telegraphs Phil's journey so obviously that Cooper really can't do much with his part and that's a shame for this great actor. He deserves so much better. He got more out of his single scene in Affleck's The Town than he gets in this entire movie.
Jones comes off best, since Gene's position differs from the other two men. When he inevitably gets his walking papers, he still owns a lot of stock options and can maintain his lifestyle to some extent, though they sort of gloss over the fact that he's having an affair with Bello's character and leaves his wife for her after he's fired (by Bello's character no less). He gets a couple of good speeches when he shows Affleck's character what the company was like in the beginning and when he admits that he got used to having expensive meals and flying on corporate jets.
Nelson has been cast as the villain of the piece, but he's a particularly one-dimensional villain whose suits might as well have been made out of cardboard, but then Wells' script doesn't try to go too deep on anything. Again, it goes back to the way his TV series were: They aimed neither for complexity nor gray areas and The Company Men doesn't make that attempt either. Slick and simple remains Wells' modus operandi in film as it does on series television.
To make matters worse, The Company Men even tries to tack on its version of a happy ending, or at least a promising one. The whole movie seems to undermine itself at every turn. It would have been an interesting idea to examine another side of the fallout of the economic crisis, but this movie doesn't present that story, at least not well.
Charles Ferguson's documentary on the financial collapse, Inside Job, ends up containing more information, more drama and more entertainment than The Company Men.
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Labels: 10s, B. Affleck, Chris Cooper, Costner, Maria Bello, Television, Tommy Lee Jones
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Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Resisting the expansion urge
By Edward Copeland
Too often when filmmakers choose to turn a short story into a movie, they can't help but enlarge the tale, feeling more is needed to justify feature length. In the case of The Yellow Handkerchief, director Udayan Prasad and screenwriter Erin Dignam have let Pete Hamill's original story dictate their actions and the result is a simple, compact and sweet film.
William Hurt has been so good for so long but it seems as if it's been ages since we've seen him get to strut his stuff in a lead as he does here in The Yellow Handkerchief. Hurt stars as a recently freed ex-con seeking to reconnect with his past who stumbles into the lives of two teens with problems of their owns.
Kristen Stewart plays Martine, uncomfortable with her burgeoning sexuality and unhappy with her home situation. Eddie Redmayne plays Gordy, a teen who seems to have embraced his awkwardness but uses his car as a charm to keep people attracted to his orbit. Both performers are good but I was particularly impressed when I learned Redmayne is British. Why is it that when American actors try different regional dialects they so often stick out like a sore thumb but Brits are so skilled at slipping into American accents without detection?
Much of the film includes flashbacks as Hurt's character as he recalls life with his wife May (Maria Bello) and the events that led to his imprisonment. Hurt's performance is a quiet one, but a powerful one.
Dignam and Prasad have managed to make a movie of The Yellow Handkerchief that really is a poignant filmed essay on loneliness with a little bit of hope for good measure.
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Labels: 00s, Maria Bello, William Hurt
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Thursday, October 26, 2006
Where there's smoke, there's satire
By Edward Copeland
While it admittedly is quite funny in parts, I found myself slightly disappointed once I finally got around to seeing Jason Reitman's writing-directing debut in Thank You for Smoking. It certainly has its moments and some really good performances, but it seems as if the film has been truncated in some way and some of its targets are so easy that it needed to raise the bar higher.
For the uninitiated, Thank You for Smoking adapts Christopher Buckley's satirical novel about a lobbyist for Big Tobacco, portrayed very well in the film by Aaron Eckhart, who may have landed his best role since he first popped up on the national film consciousness back in Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men. He's aided by a solid ensemble that includes Maria Bello and David Koechner as his fellow "merchants of death," their own term for their roles as lobbyists for the alcohol and gun industries, respectively; Sam Elliott in a small role as a dying Marlboro man; J.K. Simmons as Eckhart's boss; William H. Macy as an anti-tobacco senator; and Robert Duvall as the ornery head of the cigarette company. Somehow though, the film seems to lack a point of view and it isn't quite funny enough to make up for it.
Still, at barely more than an hour and a half long, it certainly proves watchable enough and most of the credit for that has to go to Eckhart who almost single-handedly provides the film with most of its momentum. He's a man who makes his living talking and his conviction as he espouses the cigarette industry's defense is great and makes up for a lot of what the film otherwise lacks.
Thankfully, the film doesn't feel the need to redeem his character by the end but at the same time, it seems more like a collection of skits than a fully developed story, especially with the added subplot of Eckhart's relationship with his son, played by Cameron Bright, the creepy kid from that mess of a movie Birth.
I didn't think Thank You for Smoking was a misfire, but perhaps my expectations for it were too high. The movie needed its own form of a cinematic nicotine kick.
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Labels: 00s, Duvall, Maria Bello
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