Win Some Lose Some

Proof as to why Paul Giamatti is not a super star…yet.
By Morgan P Salvo

Paul Giamatti will never be a sex symbol or even a super star… but he should be. Giamatti can run the gamut of emotions and is equally good in serious roles as comedic. He steals every scene he’s ever in, taking on weirder, less mainstream roles, having charisma to spare. But face it, Giamatti with his bug eyes and ever widening girth is a born character actor. And even though he might get the girl and even have sex, he is just not sexy.
In Win Win balding and dumpy Giamatti portrays a suburban good guy, honest lawyer and high school wrestling coach with financial troubles who finds the perfect loophole by acting as the legal caretaker of an elderly client. His plan hits a wall and the situation spins out of his control when his client's troubled grandson arrives on the scene.
Win Win feels like actor/director Tom McCarthy’s first movie instead of his third. His first two movies, The Station Agent and The Visitor were “feel good” movies that actually made me feel good, but his theme of “sharply defined personalities whose lives are interrupted by strangers” is running thin.
Win’s an ensemble piece with characters allowed equal shots at our attention, their subtle underplaying yanking out higher emotions. The standout cast includes Amy Ryan as supportive wife, best friend motor-mouth Bobby Cannavale and old coot Burt Young. The highlight is newcomer Alex Shaffer as the troubled teen wrestling “ringer” who brings to mind Sean Penn’s Specoli without the humorous, stoner edge.
Giamatti gives us hope and heart in every performance, from the relatable loser in Sideways and American Splendor to the wacked out singer in Duets and Andy Kauffman’s best friend in Man in the Moon. His nice guy quality is used to the hilt in Win Win. But the underlying explosive character is what we are waiting for. The rage that bellows from Giamatti comes so rarely, it’s just plain fun to see him yell. We need to see him explode more - what has he got to lose? He’ll never be a sex symbol because face it, who wants to see him naked? But I’d kind of like to see a raging, drooling Giamatti maniac bursting at the seams for two whole hours. Who knows? That might be a turn on for some.
Win’s last act turns heavy and is steeped in seriousness, almost defying the rest of the film yet the simple and compelling performances are worth the price of admission. But I think we deserved a decent Giamatti sex scene to help him on the road to super stardom. It’d be a win-win situation right?

Win Win
Starring Paul Giamatti, Amy Ryan, Bobby Cannavale, Alex Shaffer, Burt Young
Directed by Tom McCarthy
Rated PG-13
3 stars

Fractured Fairy Tale

Artsy Action Yarn tries too hard
by Morgan P Salvo


 Director Joe Wright (Atonement, Pride &; Prejudice, The Soloist) has now helmed an action pic. He knows how to make a film look good with actors emoting all over the place but somehow plays it too safe by the end. Sure, he puts all the pieces together in a visually stunning way with equal parts action and story but there’s still something hollow at the core of Hanna.

Right off the bat we’re introduced to the action with father (Eric Bana) and daughter Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) practicing fighting skills in some remote snowy region. And these are no run of the mill skills; they are down and dirty combat survival kill-or-be-killed tactics. She’s being trained for a mission to kill a cunning intelligence operative (Cate Blanchett) who also has been expecting her for years. Hanna sets out across Europe and through a myriad of adventures discovers some secrets about her past. This is the teenage Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
Hanna’s initial revenge set up seems too simple and the twists are divulged mostly through conversation in between the running, fighting, and killing. Through her diligence Hanna proves her mettle. There’s an underlying fairy tell here with the Wicked Witch and Snow White but its plundered aside by all the action.
Hanna’s seclusion from the real world has her quest unravel in new world wonderment which brings a nice touch to Ronan’s (Lovely Bones, The Way Back & Atonement) acting style. Ronan displays intelligence through innocent ignorance. Her fascination of her surroundings, people and music is perfectly fused with her primal bewilderment of how little she truly understands the modern world. Bana (Troy, Munich) is convincing as caring super-spy Dad. Blanchett has a lot of diabolical fun being the wicked witch/evil agent. Tom Hollander is amusing as the gay head-honcho hit-man wearing tennis outfits while leading his duo of skinhead rockers in a kind of a three stooges pursuit of Hanna.Everyone affects some sort of bizarre European accent and oddly enough Blanchett adopts a southern drawl
There are some crowd pleasing lines like when Hanna is asked “What did you mother die from”, her response is “Three Bullets”. Speaking of gunplay there is a somewhat high body count in this flick.
Hanna has some nice quiet moments alongside blood pumping action assisted by the Chemical Brothers’ reliable soundtrack. Meanwhile Wright gives us an arty light show incorporating crazy camera tricks and shots from every possible angle.
There’s one gigantic glaring unexplained error that really takes you out of the moment. After a scene depicting Hanna’s overreaction to a TV by asking “What’s that?” Later we see this lethal fighting bundle of doom in a Berlin mall typing away at a computer learning about her DNA .Where did these mad skills come from? She certainly didn’t take any computer courses while dodging bullets.

There’s a sequence near the end that takes place in an abandoned amusement park with decaying dinosaur statues that looks like it could’ve been shot down highway 97 at Chiloquin’s now defunct Thunderbeast Park but Hanna was Shot in Studio Babelsberg, located in Potsdam-Babelsberg, Germany, the oldest large-scale film studio in the world and Hanna gets extra points for being European
When all is said and done, this flick is a mixture of sci-fi meets morality play sucked into the vortex of action/espionage yarn. Hanna delivers the goods but with all its finesse somehow wallows too often in its own self awareness.

Hanna
Starring Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, Cate Blanchett, Tom Hollander
Director: Joe Wright
Rated P-G 13
2 ½ stars

Leaving on an Astral Plane

Too many ghosts and too many old tricks spoil the broth
by Morgan P Salvo

Ah… another haunted house movie or as the previews say “its not the house that’s haunted …it’s your son!” Well house or son Insidious, still qualifies as a haunted house flick sans “haunting” in the title, thereby destined to suck.
The definition of insidious is a) stealthily treacherous or deceitful b) intended to entrap c) operating or proceeding in an inconspicuous or seemingly harmless way but actually with grave effect I’ll go with all three.
This movie is so insipid and simplistic it’s a wonder it got the go ahead. I guess with the reteaming of director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell (creators of the very first Saw) and Oren Peli the producer of Paranormal Activity (one of the worst movies ever made) there was a glimmer of hope. Well hope be damned. Insidious wipes away any chance for redemption, as the pairing of the worst and best filmmakers of this genre doesn’t even come out a wash.

Insidious is about a couple (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) who’ve just moved into Amityville Horror ’s neighborhood with a home plagued by the usual creaking floorboards, clanks, howls, bumps-in-the nights and every sinister disturbance in the book. When the family's young sons lapses into a coma we find his spirit has been hijacked, overtaken by ghosts who have a way of popping up in different forms and silhouetted nightmare faces.
There’s a zillion tricks in this Poltergeist remake thrown at us at varying degrees but main scare tactic is supposed to be its slow pace. But it's far more annoying and boring than frightening.
Beginning with creepy credits emanating ghost-like vapors Insidious takes a cue from Drag Me to Hell by launching the name of the film in huge letters and blaring music. Speaking of which, the frenzied avant garde string arrangement by Joe Bishara is set to rival Goblin’s finger-nail-on-a-blackboard Suspiria’s soundtrack. Soon the parents and children move from the haunted house to find the same demonic crap happening to them all over again in their new place. Send in the ghost-busters (Whannell and Angus Sampson), the medium (Lin Shaye) and a secretive mom (Barbary Hershey) and away we paranormally go. We find out about an astral pane called “the further” where entities get in line and basically take a number to try and possess the soul of an empty body.

Insidious could have ventured into high camp if it didn’t take itself so seriously. When I play back all the stuff that happened it sounds downright funny. But it wasn’t. Dealing with an out-of nowhere coma the doctors comes from the “Never seen anything like this” school of medical science. A scary baby monitor pumping out voices straight from Black X-mas doesn’t jar. Ghost-hunters show up with plenty of gizmos, bells and whistles while the clairvoyant medium wears a gasmask for a lantern lit séance. The gadgetry happy ghost hunters are obviously comic relief but its too obvious to be funny as they fuss around with antique cameras and vintage View-Master gizmos.
I’ve heard this flick referred to a combo of Carnival of Souls meets David Lynch and that’s overreaching. Insidious has neither sensibility, but rather a TV movie’s feel with tired old genre’s tricks and clichés, none of them scary or amusing just deadpan and lifeless.

Insidious looks cool. There was about one minute total in this running time of ingenuity the rest was just bad ideas made to look good. Wan's camera likes to slowly capture vacant parts of the frame, while the soundtrack uses every creaky door and ticking clock at its disposal. When the father/son bonding time comes through an astral plane portal this is where the movie could have gone all “Altered States mind-trippy” but the astral projection world lacks any imaginative fear and or surrealism. Instead of opening the doors to creative imagery we just get sucked into another riff in a juxtaposed haunted house. Go figure. Inside resides the main demon who looks he’s wearing a Darth Maul Halloween mask prancing around the Jeepers Creepers monster’s lair as he plays Tiny Tim’s “tiptoe through the tulips” (kinda scary).
Byrne does an adequate job as the mom tormented by ghosts. Shaye (the raunchy landlady in Something About Mary) seems like the only one who knows what this movie is about. And Wilson had me wondering if he is really an actor at all. He’s the same guy in every movie. From The Watchmen, Hard Candy and Lakeview Terrace - all I see is a suburban white guy with no depth or range. By far the scariest part was the camera zooming in on Barbara Hershey’s seemingly botched plastic surgery creepily exposed under the green hues of Wan’s Saw-lensed camera.
I think the man problem maybe isn’t with the movie it’s with me. I have a hard time getting scared so if it’s anything I’ve ever seen before or has nothing original to offer I am looking at my watch. Please can’t some film out there scare me?
Insidious didn’t have to have “haunting” in the title to suck. The mere fact that it’s a haunted house flick with no redeeming originality let it suck all on its own.

Insidious
Starring Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Lin Shaye, Ty Simpkins, Barbara Hershey
Directed by James Wan
1 ½ stars

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

Sucker Punch Lives up to its Title
by
Morgan P Salvo

Unfortunately Zack Snyder the guy who brought us the fast paced Dawn of the Dead redux and the intriguing Watchmen has softened to PG-13 territory. I went in to the widely anticipated Sucker Punch wondering, will this film deliver or not? The previews looked promising. The premise of catholic-school-meets-Victoria Secret girls fighting demons, dragons and kicking ass was somewhat appealing. Well, Sucker Punch not only doesn’t deliver, it’s a wretched mess. I can only assume the reason for its title is that it lands a roundhouse blow to the back of the audience’s skull to for not anticipating how incredibly lame it would be.

The extremely disingenuous plot unfolds in music video bravado. The entire opening set-up resembles MTV, as I half expected the titles in the corner to tell me which horrid rock band was doing “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”.
Wrongfully locked away in an insane asylum orphanage, a young woman named Babydoll (an extremely pouty Emily Browning) retreats to two fantasy worlds: a brothel and dance therapy studio where a fantasy scenario is played out to imitate the nut-house high-jinks and her ‘Escape to Video Game Island’. She accesses the latter place by dancing (a feat we never see her do). As soon as she closes her big-lashed eyelids we are transported to a video game-type sword battle and/or shoot out. Determined to fight for freedom, she enlists four women – Rocket (Jena Malone), a lost soul, Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), a never explained brunette, snotty bitch Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) and Amber (Jamie Chung) as background filler to try to escape the terrible phony fate that awaits them.
Parallel universe is a cool idea if played with correctly, if not it’s disastrous. This is not a dream within a dream etc. This is a futile attempt to tell three separate stories in an effort to interlace the plot. I can’t tell which of the three versions are the worst; the unbelievable reality, the insipid brothel version, or the hideously contrived video game battle sequences.
Then there’s the bad writing. This is Snyder’s first screenplay that resembles a graphic novel but without any real attempt at social commentary. It’s all action fluff. A stupid concept that’s unoriginal to the max, Sucker Punch lacks any spunk in a virtual sea of promising spunkiness. This flick also lacks any vampiness - the heroines are dressed in schoolgirl-ballerina-slut outfits intended to entice male fantasy but do not beguile as sexpot dancers or tough chick kick-ass fighters. Instead they emerge as inept hookers and vulnerable crybabies.

The production values are immensely artistic but the chorography of slow-mo acrobatics is just old hat at this point. Overexposed to the overused Matrix-like fight sequences, we have become numb to them. Sucker Punch suffers from blatantly attempting to impress. If a flick is going to go overboard with computer graphics, let it explode with originality. Here is list of things in Sucker Punch already done more than once in other flicks: Nazi zombies… check. Shiny glass-jaw fighting faceless robots …check. Man-in-machine rock ’em sock ’em robots…check. Big Japanese samurai warriors straight out of Kurosawa’s Kakgemusha… sorry, check. Really cool-looking fire breathing dragon…check. Doomsday timer-bomb on a train…check. Scott Glenn as a Zen master…wait, now that’s never been done before. Glenn dishes out fortune cookie wisdom to the orphan chicks like Karate Kid meets Charlie’s Angels.
SP has plenty of dull moments. The dialogue is atrocious, the characters never developed and the acting is as cardboard as it gets with the exception of Carla Gugino as Dr. Gorski rattling off a polish accent and Isaac Otis (the over acting king from the recent Robin Hood) hamming it up as Blue the pimp and/or head nurse depending on whatever plane of existence you choose.
There’s a ton of dreadful and ridiculously over-used cover songs, like “Tomorrow Never Knows”, “White Rabbit” and others from Bjork, Pixies, Stooges, and Queen. But the most radical and embarrassing is Blue and Dr. Gorski’s version of Roxy Music’s “Love is a Drug” over the credits.
With such a fresh look and the girls-in-prison concept at his disposal, Snyder drops the ball and makes one long, boring, high-tech ambush. Somewhere in here is a Russ Meyer flick dying to get out. I noticed that this was a “Cruel and Unusual” film production. I concur. Sucker Punch made me feel like I got punched in the brain. All the distracting action still can’t mask the stupidity

SUCKER PUNCH
Starring Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Oscar Isaac, Carla Gugino , Scott Glenn
Directed by Zack Snyder
Rated PG-13
1 ½ stars