For the week of June 30th, Paramount and Warner Home Entertainment are (finally) bringing Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky to Blu-ray; the Blu-ray has been announced and delayed more times than a US Airways flight, ostensibly to make room for more special features, although one can't help but wonder if the near-apocalyptically bad critical reception to both Elizabethtown (moderately underrated) and Aloha (catastrophically frustrating) made Crowe a little gunshy in giving Vanilla Sky an HD makeover. And little wonder: for all their strange, idiosyncratic faults, both Elizabethtown and Aloha exist within the broad confines of the rom-com, while Vanilla Sky is darker, more unruly. It's also Crowe's first (and best) adaptation, an Americanized makeover - with one key exception - to Alejandro Amenábar's Open Your Eyes. Both films follow the same general template: a wealthy playboy (Eduardo Noriega in Open Your Eyes; Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky) is content to live a life of carefree abandon and no-strings-attached sex until he meets The One (Penélope Cruz, reprising her role from the original film) and is ready to commit emotionally, but then things get really weird, so much so that I'm loath to say more about the film for the spoiler-phobic. However, what's interesting is that just as Terry Gilliam did with last week's The Fisher King, so does Crowe take this non-original material and conform it to his unique worldview. Open Your Eyes is a far more conventional thriller, and although Vanilla Sky retains some of those elements, it's operating as more of a dark meditation on the nature of mortality, status, and love, and how the desire to be good (or otherwise) complicates those elements. In essence, it's Every Cameron Crowe Movie Ever Made (you can see the tendrils reaching back to Say Anything, Singles, and Almost Famous), carbon-dated by Crowe's simultaneously sincere/ironic dialogue (the best of which goes to Jason Lee and Kurt Russell, who gives the film's subtlest performance), the needledrop soundtrack (and Vanilla Sky might sport Crowe's most eclectic mixtape yet, with its contributions from Radiohead, Red House Painters, REM, Spirtualized, Curtis Mayfield, Peter Gabriel, Jeff Buckley, Leftfield & Afrika Bambaataa, The Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Sigur Rós, Bob Dylan, U2, Mint Royale, Joan Osborne, The Rolling Stones, Freur, and the Beach Boys), and the presence of Cruise himself, whose David Ames here could be Jerry Maguire's more unscrupluous brother. And it is that tension between source material and auteur that makes Vanilla Sky equal parts maddening and fascinating. Crowe's insights about The Way We Live Today are as profound as they've ever been (he hits at a vein of millennial angst that's far more en vogue now than it was in 2001) yet they exist uneasily against a genre stew that borrows from sources as disparate as Alfred Hitchcock, Philip K. Dick, and John Frankenheimer's brilliant Seconds. It isn't that Crowe is bad at the latter material - far from it. He shows a willingness to linger in foreboding territory more akin to a '70s conspiracy thriller or a Pedro Almodóvar melodrama, as he and DP John Toll operate in a gunmetal visual palette punctuated with bursts of casual, terrifying surrealism, the apex being Cameron Diaz's performance as Cruise's seemingly good-natured "****-buddy." In less than twenty minutes, Diaz creates a character more nuanced and frightening than her OTT Big Bad in The Counselor. But the tonal shifts can be so jarring that they can undercut the filmmaking on display, particularly in some penultimate moments that feature a Tilda Swinton cameo and the jarring introduction of "Good Vibrations." Still, for better or worse, this is Cameron Crowe's most ambitious picture, and audiences largely embraced its idiosyncratic vision in 2001. Yet the success it brought afforded Crowe the freedom to noodle in whatever outré cinematic paths he wanted, and it's hard to argue that Elizabethtown and Aloha wouldn't have worked better with a little more control and a little less choose-your-own-adventure.
In his Blu-ray review, Michael Reuben wrote that the film "did good box office, but it was not warmly embraced. In the featurette recording the promotional tour, Crowe tells of a journalist who left the interview wanting to strangle him, and in the commentary he recounts how one theater usher offered refunds before the film started to anyone who was there under the mistaken impression that they would be seeing a romantic comedy. The negative reactions were not a surprise; indeed, Crowe and Cruise (who co-produced) courted them deliberately. One of the major differences between Vanilla Sky and its Spanish source is the former's often playful exploration of a peculiarly American style of worshiping celebrity, wealth and success - a style that finds its most common expression in advertising and popular culture. What better way to subvert pop culture than to take one of its most familiar avatars, a bankable movie star with a thousand-watt smile, and systematically distort his image (and for anyone who hasn't yet seen Vanilla Sky, I mean 'distort' in the most literal sense)? In Jerry Maguire, Crowe and Cruise put a shallow but good-hearted charmer on a road to redemption that had a few odd turns but was generally familiar. Vanilla Sky's path, by contrast, goes completely off the map and possibly into another dimension. Multiple interpretations exist, and Crowe has made a point of saying that he rejects none of them, even those that are based on mistake (a date that appeared by accident in an early scene supports an interpretation the filmmakers never anticipated, and Crowe says that the film wanted to make room for that reading). In every interpretation, though, the main character wasn't the typical Tom Cruise hero. He might not even be a hero."
Warner is also releasing the raunchy comedy Get Hard (the title's not exactly subtle) on Blu-ray this week. Despite the film's can't-miss comic DNA - Anchorman's Adam McKay helped come up with the story, and then Tropic Thunder and Idiocracy scribe Etan Cohen took on co-writing and directing duties - Get Hard found itself subject to a plethora of harsh criticism this year, most notably from HtFix's Drew McWeeny, who called the film "competently made but morally repellent." Some of that ire seems justified, given the nature of Get Hard's high-concept premise: after a hedge-fund manager (Will Ferrell) gets sentenced to serve time at San Quentin, he enlists the services of his car washer (Kevin Hart) to school him in the ways of jail-time behavior, and right there, you've got two sticky widgets with which to contend. For one, Ferrell's character automatically assumes that because Hart is black, he's a felon, although the movie does a nice job of undercutting those racist undertones - Ferrell is playing yet another of his idiot man-children, and the far savvier Hart is taking advantage of his boss' stupidity (in reality, he's never been to prison either and is just as "soft" as Ferrell's white-collar boob). However, the bigger issue, for McWeeny and other critics, is the film's apparent conflation of prison indignities with male rape, as Hart emphasizes that Ferrell will get raped in prison should he fail in maintaining a convincing front. This bit is harder to defend. While comedy thrives on skirting - if not outright crossing - the lines of good taste (and programs as widely acclaimed as Blazing Saddles and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia have used rape as a nervy punchline), Get Hard sounds that note early and often, so it's easy for someone like McWeeny to read "gay panic" into the film's social agenda, particularly in the cringe-inducing setpiece where Hart makes Ferrell...get close (I'm trying to be diplomatic) with a random male stranger (Matt Walsh) in order to practice getting used to this prison vagary. As staged and written by Cohen, the scene really has nothing else on its mind than foregrounding Ferrell's discomfort with the male organ, and considering how well Cohen mined uncomfortable racial conditions for humor in Tropic Thunder, the moment feels like an unfortunate missed opportunity. And yet, as potentially (and actually) offensive as Get Hard is, I found myself laughing at it a lot. This isn't one of Ferrell's better vehicles (it isn't remotely close to Anchorman, Step Brothers, or The Other Guys), but it's also far more engaging than Kicking & Screaming and Bewitched, and its relative success stems 100% from the Ferrell-Hart dynamic. They work well together, both visually (Ferrell is tall and soft; Hart is small and wiry) and stylistically (Ferrell's absurdist wit pairs well with Hart's motormouthed intensity), that I wanted to see them play in a better movie - if they could single (or double?)-handedly make subpar material watchable, how might they fare in their own Anchorman?
Kenneth Brown had a far more negative opinion of the film, writing that "the entire film plays like a loosely connected series of vignettes. Will Ferrell tries to pick fights with body builders! Will Ferrell tries to go down on a guy! Will Ferrell learns to make shivs and stash them up his exclamation point! Will Ferrell tries to make friends with the Crenshaw Kings! Will Ferrell tries to form an alliance with white supremacists! And all while other elements of the story are either hurriedly slapped together or woefully underutilized. James' dinner with Darnell and his family is one of the smartest beats in the movie, but it's short-lived and soon forgotten. Get Hard also really, really, really, really wants us to like James. He's dim-witted, not homophobic! Socially oblivious, not racist! A decent human being, not the sort of guy who would scream uncontrollably when a black man knocks on his window! It's a tough sell, and there isn't enough clever social commentary, slick writing or carefully constructed humor to make him much more than a homophobic racist who, come on you guys, at least didn't steal money from people and at least has a black friend by the end of the movie! Am I right? I really dig Kevin Hart. I have an unhealthy love of Will Ferrell, twenty years strong. And yet I could not - no matter how hard I tried - enjoy Get Hard as much as I wanted to. I went in excited, expectations high. I was hoping for the best and had every intention to give it a fair shot. But from the moment I hit 'play,' my disappointment grew and grew and grew. Soon I was shaking my head. I laughed less and less. Glanced at the time more and more. And eventually resigned myself to merely finishing a movie that could have been so much better."
From A24 and Lionsgate comes the latest comedy from Noah Baumbach, While We're Young. Baumbach has really been hitting his stride recently; after a string of accomplished but deeply misanthrophic comedies (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, and Greenberg), the talented writer-director loosened up with the charming 2012 feature Frances Ha, which took his default themes (growing up, social dysfunction, fitting in) and cast them in gorgeous black-and-white cinematography (akin to Gordon Willis' revelatory work on Manhattan) and surprising positivity. Maybe he's softened in middle age, maybe we can credit the change in demeanor to his relationship with Frances Ha star Greta Gerwig (love makes fools of us all), but whatever the case, it's been a refreshing trend, and one that While We're Young continues. In a sense, the new film marks the union of something like Frances Ha and Greenberg. Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts star as Josh and Cornelia, a forty-something married couple whose profound dissatisfactions with getting old simultaneously expand and contract as they endear themselves to hip twenty-something couple Darby and Jamie (Amanda Seyfried and Girls' breakout star Adam Driver). On one hand, Jamie and Darby help liberate Josh and Cornelia from the expectations they feel from their peers, (as personified by Maria Dizzia and Adam Horovitz - yes, the Adam Horovitz - as their sweet-but-boring best friends), yet the increasing closeness that the older and younger couples share also makes Josh and Cornelia aware of their own mortality and achievements, particularly as Josh struggles to complete his long-developing (and, from what Baumbach shows us, profoundly ineffectual) political documentary. A film like this - coming from someone as cranky as Baumbach can be - has the potential to tipple over into a shouting match between the age groups, but for much of While We're Young's runtime, Baumbach's newfound sunniness sidesteps that issue. He mines humor from Jamie and Darby's trendy obsessions with things that Josh and Cornelia have long stopped caring about (boho fashion, vinyls, old keyboards, VHS tape), but he also looks at Josh and Cornelia's anti-aging neuroses with just the right amount of skepticism, as if he, too, wishes that they would stop focusing so much on age and just on the here-and-now. Jamie and Darby don't have that problem, and it looks like Baumbach values their ability to live without obsessing over everything...until the third act, which manages to undo much of what made While We're Young so special for so long. All of a sudden, Baumbach starts coming off like a grumpy old man: he starts fashioning the movie into a treatise on personal ethics (in the form of a underused Charles Grodin) just so he can turn Jamie into a villain and pit him against Josh. It ruins the genial, wise tone of the previous eighty minutes, and although the very end helps soften the blow, you wish that Baumbach could have completely refrained from yelling at the kids to get off his lawn.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film would have "been a bit more focused had the whole documentary filmmaking subplot been altered, or at least minimized. Josh's long gestating project offers a suitable summation of his stalled life while giving a wonderful cameo to Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary fame, here playing a kind of Saul Alinsky-esque provocateur who is the subject of Josh's film. But Jamie's machinations are overly contrived and serve almost as a McGuffin there simply to drive plot points forward. While Seyfried and Watts are incredibly engaging presences, their characters seem almost like afterthoughts or mere appendages to the two central male characters. While We're Young seems to want its comedic cake while having it dramatically speaking, too. Baumbach is a very sharp writer and there are a number of wonderful little throwaway lines that will delight many viewers. A structure which tends to emphasize vignettes rather than a more organically unfolding plot perhaps indicates that Baumbach currently excels more at microcosmic detail than in crafting a cohesive whole. The film is perfectly enjoyable and adroitly performed, but the overall arc of this piece never quite scales the comedic heights or the dramatic depths it seems to have been aiming for."
Finally, we have a couple of attempts at career reinvention from two Academy Award-winning actors: Sean Penn in The Gunman and Al Pacino in Danny Collins. It's the old story: actor stuns the world with his/her Method prowess, actor gradually slopes off into self-parody and apathy, and actor tries to get it back (see also: Brando, Marlon). So it goes with Penn and Pacino: the electricity of their work in features like Dog Day Afternoon and Mystic River has given way to a general hamminess. Sure, it's possible to enjoyGangster Squad, The Recruit, or the occasional late-period triumph (Milk for Penn; Insomnia for Pacino), but to quote the late, great B.B. King, the thrill is gone, which is why reinvention can hold such promise. In The Gunman, the über-serious, socially conscious Penn makes a stab at going full-Liam Neeson as a betrayed hitman forced to untangle a shadowy conspiracy (how fitting, too, that he enlisted Taken director Pierre Morel to help guide the action), while Danny Collins sees Pacino dialing down his default Scent of a Woman intensity in order to play light comedy: his title character is a popular singer who, worrying that he's sold out his talent in exchange for fame and fortune (shades of Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow), decides to head home and reconnect with his estranged family. The good news is, both men are splendid working in these slightly atypical realms. For The Gunman, Penn beefed himself up to Chris Pratt-in-Guardians of the Galaxy levels, and that extra bulk makes him uncommonly persuasive as the kind of blunt-force instrument meting out Taken-esque beatdowns. And Pacino is even better - the last time he really made a concentrated effort at being funny, we got the 1982 family dramedy Author! Author where he seemed just as uncomfortable making googly-eyes as we were watching him. Age has mellowed him out, and as such, we love hanging with his Danny Collins, who might be a dissolute rocker, but at least he seems supremely relaxed in his own skin. If only the movies themselves were better. In both instances, a fair amount of the onus needs to rest on the leads. There's a great, fleet concept behind The Gunman, but Penn can't leave well enough alone. Penn has always been a strong advocate for social change, so his ostensibly badass killer ends up making detours that inform the viewer of the situation in the Congo, and while his humanitarian instincts are admirable, The Gunman either needs to drop its action-y pretense and focus on the political message or drop the political message altogether (imagine if Neeson kept breaking from the action in Taken to relay all sorts of statistics about human trafficking). As such, Penn turns mindless action into an exercise in eating your vegetables first, so we don't get the benefit of watching him Hulk out. In Danny Collins' case, Pacino seems so focused on staying light and funny that he didn't realize how formulaic the script is. Writer-director Dan Fogelman wrote this great character and stranded him in an extended pilot for a mediocre Showtime series. Danny wants to find redemption, but he has to contend with his own charmingly hedonistic lifestyle (a steady supply of young women and drugs; moving a grand piano into his Hilton suite) and an estranged son (Bobby Cannavale) that doesn't want him back, although wouldn't you know, Danny's got a way with his young granddaughter (Giselle Eisenberg) and daughter-in-law (Jennifer Garner), and his (forced) banter with Annette Bening's charming hotel manager sure is cute (tedious)! Maybe it's best to think of The Gunman and Danny Collins as first, tentative steps, and that's fine. But now it's time to get to work.
Of The Gunman, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "never quite settles into a rhythm, never quite comes to identify its core purpose, never quite finds a stride and sticks to it. The film attempts to wrench in a disproportionate amount of side-story, fringe details, and haphazard subtexts, all of which overwhelm the basics and destroy what little rhythm, character depth, or mainline focus and meaning the film has on display. Its failure to identify more prominently and purposefully prevents it from building, never mind maintaining, any sort of linear story impact or character definition. Certainly the action is at its core, action which never amounts to much more than Penn busting and blasting random waves of bad guys in various African and European locales. Sure the action is slick and Penn looks surprisingly good doing it. Squarely in the midst of middle age, he's ripped and more than capable of pushing both the fisticuffs and the gunplay as hard as Morel allows, which to their credit, and to the film's benefit, is pretty far. Yet for as good as it looks, it often feels much less than it is because there's not a more tangible, easily accessible center guiding it. The movie suffers from a fair bit of haphazard storytelling, hackneyed layers, unpolished characters, and a distinct absence of originality. In short, the movie begins unglued and remains so for the duration, weaving together only the most basic plot and piling on from the edges, losing its identity in an effort to bolster its identity." Then, he wrote that Danny Collins "does a fine job of spinning a purposeful, soulful, and approachable tale from otherwise threadbare bits and pieces of dramatic cliché, it[']s made complete by a dazzling lead performance from Al Pacino, seemingly fully recovered from a few recent duds and back to top form in a part he not only embraces, but dominates, a part that he commands with a purpose, dignity, and awareness of its greater significance. Pacino rightfully plays the part not as someone totally detached from reality by his fame - he has fun with the fame (see the scene in which he first meets Mary) but his essence hasn't been so washed away by it that he's essentially become a walking shell of a man - but instead someone who has aged into it, who has gradually let life slip on by. His Collins isn't a destroyed soul, he's a lost soul, and that gives Pacino a whole lot more room to maneuver than would the typical burned out nobody living a fantasy of distortion, defined by tabloid coverage, and deemed relevant by the number of panties mailed his way. No, Danny Collins is portrayed as wounded, not devoured, someone with whom the audience can relate, even if it's at first distant and only gradually becoming more intimate. Pacino masters the character at every extreme and each juncture along the way, playing the part with a knowledgeable understanding of what the film wants to do and how his character is going to reach that conclusion. It's certainly Pacino's best acting in several years, helped no doubt by a part that, as scripted, is given the attention to detail and fine-tuned craftsmanship necessary, but credit Pacino for fully realizing the character's, and the film's, potential and giving it a vintage performance worthy to be remembered amongst his best. He's surrounded by a stellar supporting cast; Annette Bening, Bobby Cannavale, Jennifer Garner, and Christopher Plummer are terrific in their roles."