(2 People gave this 5.00 out of 5)

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“What happens to people who come to Hollywood?  Probably the same thing that happens to people everywhere . . . some make it, and some don’t.”

Check out the official site for more information: My Big Break

The H-Bomb:  During the late 1990’s, five young men shared a house in L.A., four of them were aspiring actors, one was an aspiring filmmaker.  Since the would be filmmaker, Tony Zierra, had no money, or even a specific project to make, he decided to simply film his four roommates.  He would interview them about why they were in Hollywood and what their goals were, and record them goofing off, with no real plan on how to use this footage.

Then one of the young actors, Brad Rowe, is cast in a TV show and becomes the talk of the town, with E! News labeling him “The next Brad Pitt.”  Not long after that, another one them, Chad Lindberg, finds success of his own when he is cast in the film, October Sky.  And as if it’s not incredible enough that two guys living in the same house find success in an industry where success is hard to come by, there’s a third guy by the name of Wes Bentley, who scores a choice role in a little picture you may have heard of called American Beauty.

The fourth aspiring actor of the house, Greg Fawcett, is the oldest and most eccentric of the bunch, and unlike his roommates, he isn’t having much luck.  He goes out on auditions and takes meetings, but he just can’t quite seem to catch that break.  Whether it’s landing any kind of acting work, or generating interest in the script he wrote about a man born without a dick, it’s just not happening for him.  He remains optimistic that things will someday turn around, but in the meantime, all he can do is watch as his friends’ careers take off.

Unfortunately, as we come to see, “making it” can be a little overrated, as neither Brad nor Chad are entirely happy with how their careers are turning out.  Brad is getting a lot of publicity, but work-wise, he doesn’t have much to show for it, and he really wishes that people would stop fucking calling him the next Brad Pitt.  Chad, meanwhile, isn’t satisfied with the roles he’s being offered.  He wants to be a leading man, but because his looks are unconventional, casting directors just don’t see that happening.  This is when he starts to seriously consider having plastic surgery to make himself “better looking.”

Finally there’s Wes, who, after American Beauty became a big hit and won the Best Picture Oscar, seems to be on the fast track to stardom.  He’s receiving praise from people like Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, he’s all over the covers of magazines, and everyone seems to agree that he is the next big thing…  if he plays his cards right.  But we find that Wes is completely overwhelmed by all this attention.  He doesn’t know how to deal with it, and he starts to withdraw from everyone.

That, ultimately, is what My Big Break, the documentary by Zierra about his old roommates, that spent a decade in the making, is about; not four actors trying to achieve their ultimate goal, but what could happen if they obtain it.  If there is one film that should be required viewing for anyone with dreams of making it big in Hollywood, it is most definitely this one.  I am absolutely dead fucking serious, if you want to work in this industry, be it as an actor, director, whatever, you need to see this fucking film!  I can’t stress that enough, it is an eye-opener.

In a way, it reminded me of Overnight, the documentary about Boondock Saints director Troy Duffy, which showed quite vividly how someone can fuck up after they’ve gotten their “break.” (Though nobody in this film comes off as being the utter douche bag that Duffy was in that film)  At one point, there’s an interview with a producer who says that getting your big break is not the hard part, it’s what you do with it that can be tricky.  In order for your big break to be worth a damn, you have to be ready for it, and judging from the evidence, nobody in My Big Break was ready for it.

It gradually dawns on the subjects that fame just ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.  They may want the attention and the ability to make a living as actors, but what they didn’t count on was that they would have very little say or control over which direction their careers would take.  Both their images, and the kinds of roles they should play, are left in the hands of publicists, producers, and agents.  This is conveyed through such telling moments as Wes Bentley being told not to wear glasses to the American Beauty premiere, and Brad Rowe wearing a hidden camera on him, to show how crazy it can be to attend a red carpet event, with hundreds photographers shouting his name so he’ll look in their direction.

What struck me the most was the candidness of these guys.  We see how they act on the red carpet, in a press junket, or a formal interview, and then we see how they are when they’re being filmed by Zierra, when they’re truly being themselves.  They talk about their insecurities and how discontent they are.  Brad Rowe is pissed because people won’t take him seriously as an actor.  Chad Lindberg believes so strongly that he can be a leading man, that he turns down many supporting roles and TV guest spots.  Wes Bentley gets so flooded that he just splits from the whole fucking program all together.

All of this leads back to Tony Zierra himself, and his own bittersweet history with the industry.  When he first embarked on the project of filming his roommates, he had no idea that he would end up with something this fascinating: an actual chronicle of the rise and fall of three actors, as well as a fourth actor who failed to launch (Greg Fawcett seems like an interesting guy, I’d put him in a movie).  It ultimately becomes Zierra’s story in that he actually had a documentary from this footage called Carving Out Our Name.

The fate of that documentary is something I won’t give away here, I’ll simply state that My Big Break can be seen as both a remake and a follow-up to that film.  It took Zierra more than ten years of his life to get this film out to people, but from where I stand it seems worth the time and effort, as this does provide an incredibly insightful and sobering look at three young men whose dreams seemed to come true, and the unexpected, and unwanted, effects it had on their lives.  I can only reiterate, for anyone looking for a career in the entertainment industry, this is an absolute, undeniable must see!

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Sacha Baron Cohen, back in the US and A…  Brace yourselves…

The H-Bomb:  Admiral General Aladeen (Sacha Baron Cohen) is the leader of Wadiya, a fictional country located somewhere in North Africa.  Sporting a signature beard that he was born with, and an immaculate white military uniform, he spends his days having his underlings killed for the slightest of reasons and his nights bedding Hollywood’s hottest celebrities.  Facing the threat of sanctions against his made-up nation over his nuclear program that he swears “is being developed for peaceful purposes,” Aladeen decides to travel to the United Nations in New York City to address the general assembly.

Soon after arriving in the Big Apple, Aladeen is kidnapped out of his hotel suite by John C. Reilly, who then proceeds to torture him in the most inhumane way imaginable…  by cutting off his signature sacred beard.  Aladeen manages to escape, and soon discovers that ranking members of his government have staged a coup, and that a double has taken his place at the U.N.  Aladeen attempts to tell the guards at the U.N. who he is, but to no avail.  He then listens in horror as his slow-witted double promises to reform and turn Wadiya into a democracy and will sign a treaty making it official in a few days time.

That gives our “beloved oppressor” a few days time to reclaim his identity and prevent his country from being stolen out from under him (that’s how he sees it, at least).  Eventually, he is aided by some new age hippie chick (Anna Faris) who owns a green, non-profit grocery store that will be catering the U.N. event, thus giving Aladeen a way to sneak into the building.  The only hiccup is, aside from this girl’s hairy armpits, is that she is an avid anti-Aladeen activist, and if she discovered his true identity, it could mean more trouble for our deposed tyrant on the lam.  Raunchy, audacious, gleefully politically incorrect hi-jinx, as well as cultural learnings of America for make benefit glorious nation of Wadiya ensue.

The Dictator is pretty much exactly what you would expect from Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles, the actor and director who graced the world with Borat and Bruno.  It’s filled with that same kind of “wrong” humor that can make us wince just as much as it can make us laugh.  It is an equal opportunity offender that sticks it to just about every culture in existence; Middle Eastern, America, Asian, it don’t matter.  If there’s one thing to be learned from watching these films, it’s that nothing is taboo for Cohen and Charles.

Unlike Borat and Bruno, this is a feature film, with a script and actors in every single role, as opposed to the quasi-documentaries that those earlier movies were.  And because of that, The Dictator has, unfortunately, substantially less bite.  In Borat and Bruno, we saw this ridiculous character going up to real people in the real world, and it was their honest reactions to this nut that helped make those movies as funny (and uncomfortable) as they were.  Now, I understand why they dropped that approach, as Cohen has just become too damn famous to be able to trick people anymore, but still, it has lost a certain something-something because of that.

That is, however, not to say that The Dictator is not a funny movie, because it is.  It’s often hysterical, with Cohen’s Aladeen making the sexist, racist, anti-Semitic statements that we’ve come to expect from one of his characters.  Aladeen is basically Borat, if Borat were the leader of a country.  For people with a taste for this kind of thing, there is a lot to make them split a gut over.  For me, the highlights included a scene that involved a woman giving birth and a cell phone, another in which Aladeen discovers the sacred art of self-gratification, and my personal favorite, one that’s shown partially in the trailers, Aladeen and one of his followers terrorizing a couple of tourists on a helicopter.

There are times, however, when the humor goes from being provocatively subversive to downright tasteless, such as when Aladeen is playing a first-person-shooter videogame called “The Munich Olympics”, in which, as you may have guessed, he controls a terrorist running around a dorm gunning down Israeli athletes.  At the screening I attended, that gag was met with an uncomfortable murmur instead of laughter.  Another bit that doesn’t work is a running joke in which Aladeen was constantly making up aliases for himself by reading them off of nearby signs.

But overall, the funny does outweigh the unfunny in The Dictator.  After all, how many movies are there where you get to see Ben Kingsley kiss another man’s armpits?  Or have Megan Fox spoof her own image in such a candid way?  In fact, there are a surprising number of celebrity cameos, including Edward Norton in what has to be the most demeaning role of his career.  To sum it up, if you’re the kind of person who was offended by Borat and Bruno, then you do not want to see The Dictator, because it is very crude, very rude, and goes places that other comedies would never ever dare (making jokes about African child soldiers and molesting 14 year-old boys), and what else would you expect from a film that starts off with the dedication “In loving memory of Kim Jong-Il?”

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Quoth the H-Man . . . who cares?

The H-Bomb:  In this fictionalized take on the “mysterious final days” of Edgar Allen Poe (John Cusack), which depicts the macabre writer as a penniless, boorish drunk who constantly belittles his piers and hasn’t written anything of worth in quite some time.  The only bright spot in his life, aside from his beloved pet raccoon, is his romance with the lovely Emily Hamilton (Alice Eve), whom he intends to marry, despite the very vocal objections of her powerful father (Brendan Gleason).

Then one day Poe is approached by the young and “infamous” Detective Fields (Luke Evans), who is investigating the double murder of a mother and daughter that was carried out in the exact same manner that was described in one of Poe’s stories.  Initially, Poe is the prime suspect, but as more and more murders take place, again lifted directly out of Poe’s writings, he is eventually cleared of the crimes and asked to assist in the investigation.  The expected cat and mouse game ensues as the killer leaves grim clues and Poe tries to anticipate his next move.

The stakes are raised when Poe’s fiancé is abducted by the madman and, naturally, the investigation becomes personal for him.  Now Poe is desperate and must use all of his wits to find Emily, who is buried alive somewhere, before her time runs out.  This all sounds pretty damn interesting, doesn’t it?

Well, what does seem like an interesting premise on paper, is rendered mediocre and plodding in The Raven, the latest from director James McTeigue (V for Vendetta, Ninja Assassin), a filmmaker I’m becoming less and less interested in with each passing project.  Here, he takes a genuinely cool sounding idea and, to a large extent, squanders it by turning it into a fairly pedestrian police procedural, set in the olden days, no less, with clunky exposition and sluggish pacing.

It’s not a total loss, however, as Cusack’s commanding performance as the legendary writer-turned-detective, whether drunkenly ranting or feverishly trying to piece together the puzzle, does hold our attention and keep the film from falling apart completely.  At first he seemed over-the-top, but his fiery, earnest turn gradually won me over, and he kept me invested even when the script itself did not.  Though he did ultimately nail his performance, a thing that kept nagging me as I watched Cusack, is that he looked way too healthy for a guy who was just a couple of whiskey shots away from drinking himself to death.

McTeigue’s vision of 1800’s Baltimore as a dark, shadowy, foreboding place was effective in setting up the appropriate gloomy atmosphere, and some of the set pieces, including an ambush at a masquerade ball, and a chase through the backstage of a theatre, were both well executed and exciting.  But most everything else is just a slog to sit through.  Poe’s big sit down confrontation with the killer, whose reveal is a big “so what,” is overblown and just plain silly. It’s one of those obligatory scenes where the bad guy takes ten minutes to explain to the hero what he did and why he did it, just so the audience will get it.  Lame.

Add on to that a final scene that feels tacked on and less than necessary, and what we end up with is a film that isn’t exactly bad (again, Cusack carries this motherfucker a long way), but given the inherent intrigue of its premise, it’s underwhelming at best.  For me, The Raven was particularly disappointing, as I truly did want to like it, and it feels like forever since I’ve reviewed a decent film (does this stream of mediocrity have no end???).  It’s definitely not one that needs to be seen on the big screen, but it could make an okay Net watch someday.  Or, come to think of it, your time would probably be better spent actually reading some Edgar Allen Poe, instead.

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A collage of “Indie” clichés.

The H-Bomb:  Enoch (Henry Hopper) is your basic indie film protagonist; a sensitive young man with a tragic family history who’s lost and directionless and full of angst, yada, yada, yada.   He’s in between schools for reasons we’re told late in the film (not that it really matters) and his favorite past times include crashing the funerals of complete strangers and playing Battleship with his best friend, Hiroshi (Ryo Kase), who just happens to be the ghost of a WWII Japanese Kamikaze pilot… just take a moment and let that last bit sink in.  Ready to move on?  Okay.

One day, while crashing a funeral, Enoch meets a girl named Annabel (Mia Wasikowska).  Now much in the way that Enoch is our typical indie film leading man, Annabel is our typical indie film leading lady; she’s sweet, free spirited, into nature (including bugs and birds), is not necessarily drop dead gorgeous, but attractive enough to make us smitten with her, and, of course, she is the only person on the planet who can relate to our spastic weirdo of a protagonist. (This is the exact kind of character Zooey Deschanel would’ve played had the movie been made some 4-5 years ago)

Enoch and Annabel have a few meetings before they really hit it off, but eventually they bond over their conversations about funeral crashing, funeral attire, musical instruments, and I forget what else.  Then, right before this predictably quirky relationship can really hit its stride, Annabel drops an A-Bomb…  she’s got cancer and she only has three months to live.  Enoch takes this news remarkably well and continues the relationship in which they converse with Hiroshi the ghost, throw rocks at passing trains, go trick or treating, memorize facts from bird books, along with other such activities that I would most definitely engage in if I knew I was going to keel over in three months time.

Restless, which came out quietly last Fall, is Un Film du Gus Van Sant, a director most people will know from Good Will Hunting, but who I like more for My Own Private Idaho and Elephant.  I won’t do a full run down of his career, I’ll just say he’s had his share of solid films (Milk) and not-so-solid (Psycho remake), and that he’s one of those directors whose films I will go out of my way to see.  And now that I have gone way out of my way to see Restless, I can say that it is a movie that rightly went in and out of theaters with little notice, as the movie going public missed absolutely nothing when it flew underneath their radars.

Independent films over the last few years, particularly independent romantic dramedies, have developed their own aesthetic, become basically their own genre, with their own set of clichés; and aside from the ones already laid out, we are also treated to such staples as the typical indie soundtrack.  It’s hard to describe, really… it’s the kind of music that has a lot of bouncy, boinging noises in it, the kind that’s spunky, playful, grating, and just weird.  It also features cinematography that is nice but self-consciously artsy, chock full of pretty, perfectly composed pictures of our heroes drawing chalk lines around themselves, and overall, a whimsical vibe that’s meant to be endearing but just comes off as smug.

What I have just described is more or less the whole of Gus Van Sant’s Restless, a stereotypical check list of modern “independent” movie clichés, and in describing it, hopefully, I have taken away any and all interest you might have had in actually seeing this irritatingly self-satisfied wank-fest.  It is basically, weird boy meets weird girl, they have weird relationship, in which they have one boring, pretentious conversation after another, and then she, and I’m not spoiling a thing, dies of her cancer.  And it’s no biggie when Annabel does die, because she’s made peace with that and goes out with a smile, and we should all just party when she kicks the bucket, because that’s what she would want.

Plus, you know what’s really nice about her cancer, it’s that special kind of movie cancer, the kind that allows her to look all cute and pixie-like right up until the bitter end.  Ya know, unlike real cancer, where people are usually bald from chemo, deathly thin, and look like they’re being eaten away from the inside out, which, by they way, Mr. Van Sant, is what happens to real people with real cancer, fuck you very much!

But I don’t mean to get so hot under the collar, because Restless, which is inexplicably co-produced by Ron and Bryce Dallas Howard, is not a completely awful movie, it’s just an awfully annoying one with its overly familiar, oh-so-hip art house vibe.  Usually, at least the actors would help make things a little bearable, but here, we get Hopper (son of Dennis), who displays absolutely none of his late father’s charismatic intensity, and instead just mopes through this flick like a drippy little emo punk you just want to beat the shit out of on general principle.  In other words, I didn’t like him.

Then there’s Wasikowska (good thing this is a written review, so I wouldn’t have to try and butcher that), who does manage to be appealing in a way, but again, her character is the stock indie chick in a film that is made up entirely of stock indie film ingredients.  I wouldn’t be harping on this so much if it wasn’t so damn true!  Add onto that it’s never charming, never moving, nor does it ever ring emotionally true even once in it’s ninety-something minutes (and even that slim running time feels too long).  With all that, Restless adds up to nothing more than one a big, fat, obnoxious cliché of independent cinema that absolutely is not worth anyone’s time of day.

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“Freud’s obsession with sex has to do with the fact that he never gets any.”

The H-Bomb:  One would think that A Dangerous Method, a film about how early twentieth-century psychologists Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud developed “The Talking Cure,” or psychoanalysis, would be the ideal marriage of director and material.  After all, many of Canadian auteur David Cronenberg’s past films (Crash, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch), have examined not just the psychological and the sexual, but the psycho-sexual; those whose tastes and desires fall outside the normal bump n’ grind.  It would seem that if anyone could make this subject into a compelling and provocative film, it would be him.  Unfortunately, Cronenberg’s film isn’t all that compelling or provocative, it’s not even all that interesting.  Instead, it’s a rather dry, talkative affair that’s a tad aloof, to boot.

That’s not to imply that A Dangerous Method, adapted by Christopher Hampton from his play The Talking Cure, which in turn is based on the book A Most Dangerous Method by John Kerr, is a complete failure, as it does feature some fine performances (with one exception I’ll get to shortly), as well as a premise that is intriguing for awhile.  It’s certainly well crafted, with individual aspects that are impressive; like Howard Shore’s evocative score, and Peter Suschizky’s painting-like cinematography.  There most definitely is an intelligence behind it all, but as a whole, it’s curiously unsatisfying.

The story, again, focuses on how Dr. Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Dr. Freud (Viggo Mortensen) develop a new form of therapy by examining both the conscious, what we’re actively doing/thinking/feeling, and the subconscious, mainly by analyzing dreams.  Jung and Freud develop a protégé/mentor relationship, as the former’s current research seems to be a natural extension of the latter’s.

But as the years wear on, they start to diverge in both their beliefs and practices; Freud believes that deep down our psyches are based solely on sexual desires, Jung does not.  Jung wants to make spiritual/religion a part of psychoanalysis, whereas Freud thinks it should be purely science based, since those in the scientific community are having a hard enough time accepting this new kind of psycho-therapy without the whole mystical angle.  Also, Freud feels psychoanalysis should be used simply as a research tool to understand neuroses, whereas Jung wants to actually cure his patients.

It’s these differing views that drive them further apart over time, as we see what was a productive friendship turn into a polite, but rather tense rivalry.  As stated earlier, the correspondence and conversations between Jung and Freud are of interest at first, but after awhile they become repetitive, and the endless psycho-babble becomes downright tiring to listen to.  That they argue with each other in such a calm and formal manner raises the level of dramatic tension to . . . absolutely nothing.

But it’s not just their different opinions on the specifics of psychoanalysis that drives our two legendary shrinks further and further apart, there’s also Jung’s relationship to one of his patients, Russian born Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley).  She’s a frothing-at-the-mouth whack job who comes to Jung, and he treats her with his experimental new methods, where she admits to becoming sexually excited while being spanked by daddy at a young age.  Over the next several years, Sabina becomes an analyst herself as she and Jung wind up consulting together, and eventually an affair between the damaged girl and the good doctor starts.  What would Freud think of this affair if he found out?  Could that be the one thing that ends their friendship which is already only hanging by a thread.

I can tell you how I felt about it by the time the film got to that point . . . I truly did not care!  Like I said, the film is about as dramatically flat as Keira Knightley’s boobies, which we do get to see, with an overly talky script that gets so bogged down in philosophical debates, with bullshit jargon that ultimately just makes the viewer tune out before heads start exploding, ala Cronenberg‘s superior Scanners.  Fassbender, whom I first saw in Inglourious Basterds, and seems to be popping up all over the place lately, does well as Jung, a well mannered, intelligent, professional man on the surface, who is insecure and susceptible to his desires underneath.

Mortensen, who deserved more screen time than he had, delivers a finely tuned, subtly charismatic turn as Freud, who at one point makes a self-deprecating joke there’s no topic that’s inappropriate for discussion in front of his children, since there’s really no perverse topic that hasn’t already been discussed in their presence.  Mortensen is one of those actor’s who can truly play anything; redneck, Russian mobster, sword-wielding hero of Middle Earth, Sigmund Freud . . . anything.  He has done his best work with Cronenberg over recent years, and he is easily the best thing about this film.

Which brings me to the worst thing about this film, aside from the script that doesn’t have one iota of emotional tension or engaging conflict, the performance by one Keira Knightley.  Now, it’s weird, because her performance isn’t bad throughout, she actually does get better as the movie progresses.  But in the first act of the movie, when she’s a total nutcase, Holy God, is she awful!  With over-the-top jerky body movements and facial contortions, and that she shouts every line of dialogue that she has in a jittery, crazy voice, she gives the term over-acting a whole new meaning.  It’s easy to see what’s wrong, and it’s not her, but again, the script.  This was a stage play, and she is giving a stage performance for the screen, and it is just way too much.  She really needed to dial it down, and someone – like her director, maybe – should have told her to do exactly that.

This was a difficult review to write, as Cronenberg is one of my favorite directors.  Whether it’s one of his warped, deliciously sick sci-fi/horror flicks, or one of his more mainstream efforts, he usually delivers the goods.  But this time, he only half-delivered.  A number of his recurring themes are present, but they’re in a script that’s cold and clinical, where such things as human emotion are non-existent.  It pains me to say, that of the films Cronenberg has made since the new millennium (Spider, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises) this is easily his worst.  Those interested in Freud, Jung, and their school of thought may get more out of A Dangerous Method, but the rest of us, especially fans of this truly unique director, will more than likely be under-whelmed and perhaps a little bored.  And a movie featuring the world’s kinkiest shrink should never, ever be boring!

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“Sometimes in order to heal, a few people have to get hurt.”

The H-Bomb:  Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is the thirty seven year old author of a series of young adult books that have been falling out of popularity as of late.  In fact, she has been told that the next book will be the last of the series.  This, naturally, has put her life into a kind of tailspin.  Not only has she been having trouble writing anything, but she’s also been drinking like a fish and picking up random guys at bars on a regular basis.

But it‘s not just her alcoholism or her professional problems that have her so hot and bothered, there’s also the e-mail she received from her old high school boyfriend, Buddy (Patrick Wilson), containing a photograph of his newborn daughter.  After stewing over it for a bit, Mavis spontaneously grabs her little dog and a few bags, and hits the road back to her hometown… with the intention of reclaiming her old beau.

This is the first time she’s been back in town in years, and she’s a little alarmed at how the corporate chains have been taking the place over.  They have a Chili’s, a Staples, and even a “KenTacoHut” (those three-in-one places consisting of KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut).  Soon after her arrival, she seeks out a bar and it’s there where she runs into Matt (Patton Oswalt), a pudgy guy she went to high school with, who she remembers as being the “Hate Crime Guy.”  Matt is disabled, for reasons you‘ll have to see the movie to find out, with a rather sour outlook on life.  He and Mavis form a sort-of friendship which consists mainly of boozing and bitterly reminiscing.

Mavis lets slip that she’s in town to try and win Buddy back, and Matt, knowing that Buddy is a married man with a new child, is less than approving of her plan.  But Mavis sees the whole wife and kid thing as merely a minor obstacle that stands between her and Buddy.  When she finally does meet up with her old boyfriend, she finds that he does seem to be perfectly content in his new role as husband and father, but she convinces herself that he can’t possibly be, because he leads an utterly boring life in an utterly boring hick town that “stinks of fish shit.”  Mavis is oh-so-certain that Buddy would be much happier with her, but will she be able to convince him of that?

Young Adult re-unites director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody, the team behind the Academy Award winning Juno.  This time they’re telling a more grown up story about a woman who never really grew up.  It’s a more thematically sophisticated film than Juno, and the stylized, hipster dialogue has, for the most part, been set aside, so the characters speak more naturally and sound like actual human beings.  It’s also far more cynical than Juno, with a sense of humor that has a lot more bite and a lot less charm.

That leads me to my big hang up with Young Adult, the lead character.  Theron is fantastic in the role, make no mistake, this is probably her best performance since her Oscar winning turn in Monster.  My problem is with her character, Mavis, in that she is a complete and total bitch.  She is truly a horrible, reprehensible person.  I am tempted to use the C-word, though I won’t, at least not on the record.  Mavis is an extremely selfish, spiteful woman who truly does not give a good God-damn about anyone else.  She really could not care less if she breaks up Buddy’s family, or how her words and actions might affect the feelings and well being of others.  When she’s not wallowing in her own unwarranted self-pity, she is cruelly putting down and demeaning the people around her.  She is indeed a detestable human being.

Usually, in this kind of film, a character like Mavis would go back to her roots, realize what is wrong with her life, learn a lesson, and emerge a better person.  That doesn’t happen here.  Mavis never learns her lesson, nor does she ever redeem herself at all, and my problem with this is that I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about her.  Or rather, how Reitman and Cody want me to feel about her.  This nagged me the most during her pivotal “poor little me” monologue towards the end.  If Reitman and Cody want me to have nothing but contempt for Mavis, then they succeeded admirably.  If they; however, intended me to feel sympathy for her, in spite of her faults, then they failed miserably.

Another issue I had was that Cody was at times a little too on-the-nose in spelling out some of the themes of the film.  For example, there’s one scene where Matt straight up tells Mavis that she’s basically still just a child trapped in the body of a grown woman, as if Mavis’s actions and self-absorbed attitude, not to mention the fact that she dresses like a teenager, weren’t enough to get that across.  We the audience are capable of connecting the dots ourselves, Diablo, we don’t need you to do it for us.

Okay, so I’ve given Young Adult a pretty rough ride, so why the three and a half star rating?  Because despite all those things, it is still a damn good film.  Even if I don’t like Mavis as a person, she still has a scathing sense of humor, that was often very funny, that made me laugh throughout, and again, Theron just hit it right out of the park.  Oswalt is also excellent as the down-on-his-luck Matt, a guy who has been crapped on so many times throughout his life, that his negative attitude is understandable, and he, unlike Mavis, is sympathetic.  Wilson, meanwhile, plays the friendly, small town nice guy and manages to not make him bland, which is quite a feat in and of itself.

Some people who go into this might be slightly shocked that the sweetness of Juno has been stripped away and in it’s place is a kind of humor that’s mean and pessimistic, but that’s also wickedly funny, provided your sense of humor is the opposite of PC.  If you’re someone who must absolutely like the lead character in order to like a film, then you should probably just skip this one.  But if you have a taste for bitter comedies with a poisonous edge, then Young Adult may be right up your alley.

(1 People gave this 3.00 out of 5)

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Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie…

The H-Bomb:  In case the title is not enough of an indicator, the American Pie gang is back, descending on their home town of Great Falls for their thirteen year high school reunion… why thirteen?  Because no one from their school bothered to organize a ten year reunion (that’s literally what we’re told).  So what has everyone been up to since American Wedding?  Well, Oz (Chris Klein) is now a big shot sportscaster and a former “Dancing with the Stars” contestant.  Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) is now a happily married housewife.  Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) has turned himself into a regular Renaissance Man, traveling the world to experience many exotic cultures firsthand.  Stifler (Seann William Scott) is slaving away in a demeaning job as an office temp and is just as big an asshole as ever.

As for Jim (Jason Biggs), he is still married to ex-band geek Michelle (Alyson Hannigan), and they now have a two year old son as well as some… intimacy issues.  They realize that their sex life is not as healthy as it should be when they both experience a bad case of Masturbatus Interuptis during the opening scene.  This of course, is the first of many sexually humiliating situations that Jim will find himself in, which have been a staple of this series.  In one of these scenarios, we even get to see Jim’s manhood, which has been the victim of much abuse over the course of four movies.  In addition to all this, he is still getting unwanted sex advice from his well intentioned Dad (Eugene Levy), who is now a widower.

Jim’s friends have it a little easier, as both Oz and Kevin have to deal with seeing their old high school sweethearts, Heather (Mena Suvari) and Vicky (Tara Reid), for the first time in years.  Some half-baked drama ensues from this, but not many laughs.  Finch seems to finally be over Stifler’s Mom (Jennifer Coolidge), and has taken a liking to a hot bartender who happens to be a fellow classmate.  Stifler has never quite moved on from high school and just wants to party like it’s 1999 (literally).

I really love the original American Pie.  It was raunchy as hell, but it was also genuinely funny, with real heart behind it, and strong characters who, despite being sex obsessed, were very likeable and relatable.  Then came American Pie 2, which I didn’t like at all.  The raunch was there, but the charm was gone, as were the laughs.  American Wedding followed, and while it was a definite improvement over the second movie, it didn’t even come close to touching the original.

Now we have, whether we wanted it or not, American Reunion, arriving some nine years after the last one (I don’t count the slew of straight to DVD “sequels” in between).  This movie reminds me a lot of Scre4m, which came out a year ago this month.  Both came after their franchises had been dormant for a decade, both try to milk their brand names for all their worth, both attempt to recapture, with a hint of desperation, the magic that made their originals so great…  and both are pretty underwhelming.

While I found American Reunion watchable, curiously enough I didn’t laugh out loud once, though I did smile a number times, mainly from the antics of Stifler and Jim’s Dad; the party scenes where they drink and spend quality time together are the best in the movie.  Everything else involving the rest of the cast is pretty limp.  Kevin is worried about cheating on his wife with Vicky, Oz finds he still has feelings for Heather, even though he’s dating a supermodel.  All this drama just didn’t interest me, and the film just got boring during these parts.

Even the eccentric Finch, who has always been my favorite character in this series, is just kind of dull here.  The movie seems to put all it’s comedic chips into Stifler’s mugging and Jim’s sexual mishaps, which just aren’t enough.  None of them are as memorable as the pie fucking from the first movie, and they just reek of too much effort, like, again, showing Jim’s dick on camera, or putting him in a gimp outfit.  One sequence has Jim trying to sneak the girl he used to baby sit for, who is drunk and naked, back into her house without her parents noticing.  This girl conveniently just turned eighteen that night, so we don’t have to feel creepy about looking at her, but we do anyway.  It’s a sequence that goes on too long and isn’t all that funny, the same could be said for the whole film.  For the most part, the raunchiness seems toned down from the outrageousness of the past movies, and not for the better.

On the plus side, just about everyone is back, even the ones who missed Jim’s wedding.  It’s nice seeing all these people again, even those who only pop in for a scene or two.  Shannon Elizabeth gets to use her laughably awful Russian accent again, and John Cho shows up from time to time as the Asian MILF Guy, though now he’s apparently gay, without any rhyme or reason or explanation whatsoever.  Seeing all these people in the same movie again do give me a sense of nostalgia, kind of like the one I got while watching Scre4m.

Nostalgia, sadly, is basically all American Reunion has to offer.  No real laughs, no interesting updates on the characters, just trading on the fond memories of the original.  I used to hate Stifler, but this time he, along with Jim’s Dad, are the only ones keeping this overlong, badly paced party from turning into a total bore.  Even the songs on the soundtrack try to remind us of that earlier, better film.  If anything, that’s the one thing that American Reunion succeeded in doing, making me want to revisit the original, and that is exactly what I suggest you do.  This is one Reunion you can miss.

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“Paradise can go fuck itself.”

The H-Bomb:  Lately, the life of Hawaiian lawyer Matt King (George Clooney) has been looking a lot like a tsunami.  He’s being pressured by his many cousins to sign off on a deal to sell a large chunk of land on Kauai, land they all inherited from their ancestors.  The deal would make millions for all of them, but would also lead to the destruction of this beautiful land to make way for condos and resorts.

In addition to that, Matt also has to contend with his two daughters; ten year old Scottie (Amara Miller), who has been making waves with her photography and certain comments about female puberty, and seventeen year old Alex (Shailene Woodley), a prototypical wild child who is off at a reform school for boozing, drugs, and boys.  Matt has never really been that comfortable in his role as a father, and thinks of himself as being “the understudy…  the back-up parent.”

But where is his wife?  Well, that is probably the most destabilizing factor in Matt’s life right now.  His wife was involved in a boating accident that has left her in a coma.  And even though Matt has been holding out hope while holding her hand and cleaning out her bedpan, one day her doctor sits him down to deliver the bad news, that her condition has worsened and she won’t be waking up.

Now Matt has to figure out how to break the news of his wife’s imminent death to all of their friends and family, including his two daughters and his temperamental father-in-law, Scott (Robert Forester).  The older daughter, Alex, has been estranged from her mother for a few months, and when Matt finally confronts her about it, she reveals a secret about her mother that hits him like an A-Bomb.  Something that will forever affect the way Matt feels about his dying wife.  I won’t give away what it is, though the trailer already did so for me, as did some of the Oscar clips.

It’s this revelation that sends Matt on a journey, both an actual physical journey to discover the truth about his wife, and an internal one, in which he reflects on his own life as a husband and a father, and how he could have done a better job at being both.

The Descendants is the latest dramedy from Alexander Payne, the director who also brought us such bitter-sweet films as About Schmidt and Sideways.  I happen to be an enormous fan of Sideways.  It was actually my favorite film of 2004, and I actually had the opportunity to tell Payne so in person when I, by chance, ran into him in Cannes in 2005, mere months after winning the Academy Award for adapting the screenplay for that film.  (H-Man Aside: He couldn’t have been nicer)

He has now taken home his second Oscar for co-writing the script for this one, based on a book by Kaui Hart Hemmings.  Like with Sideways, the award was richly deserved, but is The Descendants as good as Sideways?  Not quite.  It’s about as close to it as I could’ve expected it to be, but being a struggling writer myself, I was able to relate to the protagonist of Sideways more, and, for me, it‘s just a funnier movie.  With The Descendants, Payne has toned down the scathing humor in an attempt to tell a more sincere story.  That’s not to say it isn’t there, since, as usual, Payne finds ways of finding amusement in otherwise serious situations; like the dumbass kid making fun of Matt’s senile mother-in-law, or Matt giving his seventeen year old daughter a spanking in his wife’s hospital room.  The film is laced with this kind of muted humor, placed in just the right spots, to keep the drama from turning it into a Lifetime movie of the week.

Like with his previous films, Payne gives us characters who feel like people plucked right out of real life.  This isn’t the tourist view of Hawaii, though there is some lovely Hawaiian scenery on display, this is Hawaii from the people who actually live there.  As Matt lays out in his opening narration, just because they live in “paradise” doesn’t mean there lives are just one long vacation, they still have to work, pay taxes, and die, just like the rest of us.  Payne has a talent for making us care about flawed, but fundamentally, good people, and here he has worked his magic again.  At the beginning, I wasn’t liking any of these characters, but they change subtly through the story, and by the end, I found myself actually moved by what they had been through.

Another thing Payne has a talent for is casting the perfect actors from top to bottom.  Everyone, from Clooney all the way down to Beau Bridges and his little bit, is just fantastic.  Twin Peaks fans will have fun spotting Michael Ontkean as one of Matt’s cousins, and Matthew Lillard turns up in a crucial role as a man who has both business and personal ties to Matt.  Holy shit, I didn’t even know that guy was still alive!

All kidding aside, Clooney is really at his best as this Hawaiian “everyman,” and I’m going to go ahead and say it, he should have won the Best Actor Oscar for this.  As good as Jean Dujardin was in The Artist, I feel Clooney’s performance was the better of the two.  Woodley, who I’ve never seen before, was just a revelation as Matt’s older daughter Alex.  At the start, she’s a shallow, self-absorbed bitch, but once her father delivers the news about her mother, there’s a great moment where she instantly turns into an actual human being.  Miller is also excellent as the younger daughter who Matt tries to shelter the news about his wife from.

Again, this is a perfect cast in a near perfect film.  Why near perfect?  Well, it is kind of languidly paced in spots, which will have the A.D.D. crowd picking their butts and crying boredom, and the characters, though ultimately sympathetic, are a little off-putting when we first meet them.  But those minors things aside, I don’t think I’m overstating anything when I say The Descendents is another masterpiece of suburban dysfunction from Payne.  It’s a film that’s both heartfelt and hilarious, and one that everybody should see.

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It’s the name of a planet.

The H-Bomb:  It’s also the name of the mental disorder that afflicts the lead character, Justine (Kirsten Dunst).  After an Earth shattering opening sequence, the film proper starts on Justine’s wedding night, with her set to marry nice guy Michael (Alexander Skarsgard).  The marriage is being held at the secluded estate of Justine’s older sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and her wealthy, astronomer husband John (Keifer Sutherland), who has, as he reminds both Claire and Justine, footed the bill entirely for this lavish shindig.  The wedding is being attended by everyone from her big shot marketing employer (Stellan Skarsgard) to her divorced parents (John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling).

We get the feeling almost immediately that something is very wrong with Justine, that she just is not acting the way a young woman should on what is supposed to be the happiest day of her life.  In fact, we find that happiness is a feeling that is entirely alien to this girl.  It starts with her showing up two hours late to her wedding ceremony, then proceeding to act like a total flake-and-a-half throughout the reception, often disappearing to wander the estate’s eighteen hole golf course and do God knows what else.

It’s hinted that Justine’s oddness is hereditary, as both of her parents are both somewhat south of normal.  Her father shows up with, not one, but two girlfriends (hookers) named Betty, and her mom, whose just about as upbeat as she is, gives a speech at the reception that ends with, “Enjoy it while it lasts.”  After getting a load of those two, we certainly understand where Justine gets it from.  Anyhow, her behavior on this night, the specifics of which I won’t give away, leave her newly minted marriage in shambles and her promising career in ruins.

From there Justine is left in a deep, crippling depression.  The kind of which leaves her sleeping away most of the day, and so inert that she practically has to be carried to the bathroom and the dinner table.  She is being cared for by her sister Claire while living in her brother-in-law’s humongous mansion.  Even though Claire tells her, “Sometimes I truly hate you,”  in reality Claire is the only one who really cares for Justine, as she tries, with little success, to help her through it all.

Meanwhile, as if her sister’s problems weren’t enough, Claire has become concerned about reports of a planet called Melancholia, which is hurtling through space at an alarming rate, and may or may not be on a collision course with Earth.  John assures her that it’s not, that it will miss us just like it missed Mercury and Venus before.  But, the things she’s reading online tell a different story, as does Justine, whose own mental state seems to give her some insight into this matter.

Are we all doomed?  Is extreme depression just seeing the world for the way it really is?  That is one way Melancholia, the title with more than one meaning, could be interpreted, that nothing really matters because we’re all fucked anyway.  I certainly can relate to that sentiment, though I’m not quite that pessimistic, yet.  Written and directed by Lars Von Trier, Melancholia can be looked at as a follow up to his excellent (in my opinion) Antichrist- though I should state right now that we never get the wince inducing violence found in that film.

Both films came about by (what he alleges is) his battle with depression, but while Antichrist is a product of this depression, Melancholia could be looked at more as a dissection of it.  A portrait of someone trying to cope with it and, in vain, overcome it.  It puts us in Justine’s position, where she questions if it’s even worth overcoming, since because of her despair, she feels the whole world is ending.  Again, the feeling of any deeply depressed person, which Von Trier literalizes in the prologue and epilogue of this film, a visually stunning, purely cinematic pair of sequences set to classical music (Wagner).

The striking, painting like imagery is, with some exceptions, mainly limited to the beginning and ending, as the bulk of the film is shot primarily in that deliberately sloppy handheld style more in common with Von Trier’s Domge ’95 philosophy.  It definitely aids in getting us into Justine’s point of view, but it can also be a strain on the eyes, to the point of inducing a mild headache with this reviewer.

Melancholia has a sly, mischievous sense of humor in the first half of it, the half covering Justine’s ill-fated wedding, that makes it lighter going than a lot of Von Trier’s prior work.  Hurt and Rampling are amusing as the “eccentric” parents of Justine and Claire.  “Is there anyone in your family who isn’t stark raving mad?” John inquires of Claire after enduring the antics of his in-laws.  Udo Kier is also funny in his bit as a wedding planner who is so disgusted with the way his event is turning out, that he refuses to even look at Justine, covering his eyes whenever she is near.

But the wedding sequence ultimately introduces us to a lot of characters that, while interesting, we won’t see again once this sequence is over, and much like the famed wedding sequence of The Deer Hunter, it just goes on too damn long.  It more than establishes what it needs to establish, that Justine is nuts, her whole family is nuts, except for big sister Claire, who is always picking up after her.  It then keeps driving that point home over and over until we’re just begging for it to move on.

Once it finally does move on to after the wedding, Von Trier does intrigue us with where it might go from there, especially with the introduction of the threat of the planet, Melancholia.  Sadly, while I was never disinterested, I wasn’t as immersed in what was happening as much as I was in Antichrist.  I thought the scenes of Justine’s catatonic moping were repetitive, and by the time Melancholia (the movie, not the planet) reached its inevitable end- which was revealed in the prologue- I thought to myself, “Thank God!  Finally!”

I can only speak for myself, but I just never found it as gripping, or profound, or moving as I sensed it was trying to be, and Von Trier’s use of imagery, while again striking, came off as heavy handed and pretentious.

However, that’s not to say I didn’t like it, because I did.  This is mainly due to the many colorful supporting performances in the first half of the film, as well as those of the lead actors.  I’ve never been a big fan of Dunst.  I’ve found her to be a passable actor, but not a great one…  until now.  Her work in this is simply phenomenal, as she truly makes us feel the pain of her character’s condition.  She won best actress at last year’s Cannes Film Festival for her performance, and the fact that she was overlooked by the Academy for even a nomination only strengthens my growing lack of respect for that once great institution.

That’s to say nothing of the equally fine work by Gainsbourg, who was just as fantastic as the crazy one in Antichrist.  Here, she’s ostensibly the sane one, only her sanity starts to crack as she is burdened with caring for her truly sick sister, and her own anxieties, which start to grow as the planet Melancholia looms larger and larger in the sky.  Her transformation from calm and collected to absolutely frightened is one that Gainsbourg sells in spades.  And it would be irresponsible of me not to mention Sutherland’s terrific turn, as a man who appears to be in control and have all the answers, but as it turns out, the exact opposite is true.  Once again, great work.

Overall, Melancholia is one melancholy movie experience, and for me, a little oversold by the hype (Von Trier’s moronic comments that got him banned from Cannes didn’t help, either).  Though again, it is a perfectly solid film, if a complete and total downer.  It’s seems like one where more can be gleaned from it with multiple viewings, and I certainly do intend to view it again… someday.  Anyone who struggles with manic depression should probably skip this one entirely, as it will not help you with your problems.  At all.  Trust me on that.  And those with a disdain for all things “artsy fartsy,” should probably avoid it, as well.  But the thoughtful film-goers out there, who like a little substance with their entertainment, and those who can find enjoyment in downbeat movies that make them feel like shit, may just find something to like in Melancholia.