Author: jonathankiefer

With more precision and presence of mind, Lawless might have pitched itself as an origin story of the whole gangster-movie genre. But like the transparent moonshine its backwoods brooders guzzle down in just such a way as to remind us it’s fake, the movie itself seems conspicuously diluted, more water than fire.

Sourced from Matt Bondurant’s historical novel The Wettest County in the World, and focused on the three Bondurant brothers who ran a bootlegging racket in Virginia’s Franklin County in the early ’30s, it’s also a faithful booster of family lore. What story there is here has the brothers protecting their operation, sometimes brutally, from various violent encroachments.

Of course, on account of being portrayed by actors from three different countries, these Bondurants don’t really look or sound related, but they do at least have a common fervor for going to town on their given dialect. Howard, played by the Australian Jason Clarke, is a volatile drunk. Forrest, played by the Brit Tom Hardy, is a fearless WWI survivor, tough and taciturn except when croaking out little speeches to build pre-beatdown suspense. Narrator Jack, played by Shia LaBeouf, is the youngest, dramatized and directly described as “the runt of the litter,” but impressionable and ambitious and at least, in his way, genuinely American.

Given his appearance and his standing here, Jack’s sort of the Wesley Crusher of this enterprise: the innocent contrived conscience we could do without but may eventually agree not to mind. It is therefore somewhat unsettling to discover that, with the exception of Dane DeHaan as Cricket, Jack’s obviously expendable accomplice and pal, LaBeouf actually delivers the movie’s least mannered performance. And this includes Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska in thankless threatened-damsel parts.

The aforementioned encroachers include Gary Oldman, underused as a local gangster, and Guy Pearce, overused as a dandyish federal deputy. “It’s special deputy,” he insists, and we surmise that he’s the villain of the piece, meant to seem both menacing and amusing. A little laughable but never quite funny, Pearce promptly lapses into his familiar tendency to strive harder than the material warrants. At best, when screwing up his face, he looks like Sigourney Weaver on the prowl for aliens.

This ought to enliven what otherwise just seems like a more rural and less capacious “Boardwalk Empire,” but no such luck. Written by Nick Cave, who with fellow Bad Seed Warren Ellis also presides affectionately over its music, Lawless offers possibly too-comfortable turf for director John Hillcoat, who managed other unstable family clans in the pre-civilized wilderness of The Proposition (also written by Cave) and the post-civilized one of The Road (also scored by Cave and Ellis). As its conflict escalates and a mutual vengeance takes the place of any sort of substantively dramatic anticipation, the movie never finds a stance on the violence it portrays. Are we to think it atrocious or awesome? Ah, maybe both, and that’s what makes it interesting, eh? Ah, maybe not.

Lawless/R, 115 minutes/Carmike Cinema 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zl7S1LaPMU

When you’re young and in love, “forever” is a word you dare to carve in tree trunks or wedding cakes. Getting older, if you’re not careful, that same word could mean a purgatory of codependence. Such is the wry wisdom of Celeste and Jesse Forever, a romantic comedy whose main characters spend the duration figuring out what the audience already knows: not that they belong together, but that breaking up is hard to do.

For the eponymous L.A. couple played by Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg, directed by Lee Toland Krieger, the courtship phase occurred long ago. Now they’re just two great friends in a failed starter marriage. As obvious as it is that things won’t work out between Celeste the careerist and Jesse the aimless artist, it’s equally obvious that they’re inseparable. Even after announcing the divorce, they’re still hanging out together, avowing mutual love, running unabashedly through their familiar repertoire of inside jokes, and seriously weirding out their friends (Ari Graynor and Eric Christian Olsen).

To clarify, Celeste points out, “I love Jesse dearly but he doesn’t have a checking account. Or dress shoes. The father of my children will have a car.” He isn’t much help with assembling her IKEA furniture in any functional way, but he knows how to turn it into a robot sculpture. Yet, as soon as another woman (Rebecca Dayan) appears in Jesse’s life, and he suddenly seems ready for adult responsibility, Celeste reconsiders, albeit indignantly. It’s a complicated bundle of feelings, and Jones nails it.

A professional trend forecaster (she’s written a book called Shitegeist), Celeste is accustomed to rattling off pop-cultural pronouncements, and it shows in her withering dismissal of a sweet but slightly unhip financial analyst (Chris Messina) who hits on her in a yoga class. The scene is ingeniously played, a gender reversal of the similar business put over by Woody Allen in Annie Hall, to which Carol Kane famously responded, “That was wonderful. I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.” Here, Messina’s character duly allows Celeste’s appraisal of him, admitting that in fact he only took the class to meet girls. Later, it takes an obnoxious young pop star (Emma Roberts) to call her on her habit of “contempt prior to investigation.”

Jones co-wrote the Celeste and Jesse script (with actor Will McCormack, who appears here, amusingly, in a supporting role), and she has created an opportunity for herself, to affirm not just her beauty and on-screen appeal, already obvious, but also the range of her emotional intelligence. Accordingly it’s more Celeste’s movie than Jesse’s, and Samberg, for his part, seems relatively and shrewdly subdued; we may say this film better justifies his departure from “Saturday Night Live” than That’s My Boy. Although not without a few rom-com clichés, it’s also authentic and self-aware, evidently aspiring to the highest standards of the genre. Silly and messy, as you’d expect, and also sad and true.

Celeste and Jesse Forever/R, 89 minutes/Regal Downtown Mall 6

Playing this week

2016 Obama’s America
Regal Downtown Mall 6

The Bourne Legacy
Carmike Cinema 6

Brave
Regal Seminole Square 4

Celeste and Jesse Forever
Regal Downtown Mall 6

The Campaign
Carmike Cinema 6

The Dark Knight Rises
Regal Seminole Square 4

Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
Dog Days
Regal Seminole Square 4

The Expendables 2
Carmike Cinema 6

Hit and Run
Regal Downtown Mall 6

Hope Springs
Regal Downtown Mall 6

Ice Age: Continental Drift
Regal Downtown Mall 6

Lawless
Carmike Cinema 6

Marvel’s The Avengers
Regal Seminole Square 4

Moonrise Kingdom
Regal Downtown Mall 6

The Odd Life of
Timothy Green
Carmike Cinema 6

The Oogieloves in the
Big Balloon Adventure
Regal Seminole Square 4

ParaNorman
Carmike Cinema 6

The Possession
Regal Seminole Square 4

Premium Rush
Regal Downtown Mall 6

Sparkle
Carmike Cinema 6

Ted
Regal Seminole Square 4

Beasts of the Southern Wild
Vinegar Hill Theatre

Movie houses

Carmike Cinema 6
973-4294

Regal Downtown
Mall Cinema 6
979-7669

Regal Seminole Square Cinema 4
978-1607

Vinegar Hill Theatre
977-4911

 

 

The agenda of director Jay Roach’s new movie is obviously not to mine the finer nuances of American electoral procedures. This might come as a shock or a relief, depending on whether you go into The Campaign remembering Roach as the politically-minded maker of HBO’s Recount and Game Change or you only know him from the Fockers films. In any case, now Roach has split that difference. His agenda, for what it’s worth, is lowbrow bipartisan spoofery.

Well, America, what is it worth? In The Campaign, Will Ferrell plays an entrenched North Carolina congressman challenged by an unlikely opponent in the form of Zach Galifianakis. Unlikeliness, of course, used to be the Galifianakis touch; here it’s a dull nudge, or whatever you want to call a weary reprise of the prissy oaf he played in Due Date. Meanwhile Ferrell looks to have hauled out his old George W. Bush impression, and sensing the staleness, hosed it off with a splash of randy John Edwards. The setup alone is a bloodless, been-there farce. But maybe that sends a message of safety and security. So can it count on your vote?

With strings pulled by callous sibling super-funders modeled on the Koch brothers and played by John Lithgow and Dan Aykroyd, the candidates’ contest escalates from gaffe-intensive buffoonery to the brinksmanship of outrageously dirty mud- slinging. Among a clutter of pundits tediously playing themselves, Jason Sudeikis and Dylan McDermott show up as rival campaign managers, respectively servile and shark-like. Before long it’s a slog, quite like a real campaign but otherwise too broad a cartoon and too soft a satire, full of cheap shots at easy targets and many scattered bits of uninspired vulgarity. (Inspired vulgarity would be fine.)

Writers Chris Henchy and Shawn Harwell try to repurpose the usual campaign movie clichés as punchlines but can’t fully forsake their pieties; Roach and his complacent stars take that cue to churn out a film whose sentimental fizzle-ending “heart” seems as much of a cynical calculation as the politically corrosive corporate profiteering it limply sends up. Ultimately this sort of thing is best on cable, and eventually channel-surfed away from. Richer parodies remain available on “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” as does the parody that writes itself, regularly, in current events.

Someone, somewhere may think the timing of The Campaign’s release is politically motivated. Although scarcely issue-driven, or challenging in any real way, it does seem to have gotten shoved into the doldrums of the August dumping-ground, between peak summer blockbusters and autumn’s onset of prestige pictures. At best it offers a vacation of sorts, some recuperative last laffs before the grim home stretch of real-life campaigning carries us into November. And if the it’s-all-a-joke mindset feels neither constructive nor cathartic, it does have the dubious virtue of staying forever unserious.

The Campaign/R, 88 minutes/Carmike Cinema 6

Movie houses
Carmike Cinema 6 973-4294
Regal Downtown Mall Cinema 6 979-7669
Regal Seminole Square Cinema 4 978-1607
Vinegar Hill Theatre 977-4911

The feature debut from writer-director Benh Zeitlin, working with playwright Lucy Alibar and a New Orleans collective, rides in on a murky flood of festival hype. And what caused that anyway? The inevitable Sundance-stamped confluence of poverty porn and indie quaintness?
Wow, already this is sounding cynical, but Beasts of the Southern Wild has a habit of inviting audience push-back. For starters, it’s called Beasts of the Southern Wild; right away one senses some amateur anthropology going on, apologized for or at best compounded with amateur poetry. Still, the amateur operates from love, and Zeitlin has that. However patronizing, his reverie aches to be watched, and on as large a screen as possible. It says: Behold!

Newcomer Quvenzhané Wallis steals the show as a brave 6-year-old who yearns for her missing mother, copes with her ailing father (Dwight Henry), and navigates the archly magical-realist realms that lurk amid the muck and grit of her doomed, levee-locked Louisiana bayou. Hushpuppy is her name, and she dwells in a fishing boat rigged from a pickup truck’s rusted rear-end, and she is tough and tenacious, and she has visions of melting ice caps. Behold: the innocence, the resilience, the retrospectively peculiar-seeming fortitude of childhood, galvanized by apocalyptic anxiety. Too much?

Wait, there’s more. Her father is called Wink, as if the movie were just kidding when setting him up as an epitome of rough parental neglect, for in fact his declining health reduces—nay, enlarges—him to a heap of tender devotion. Meanwhile, the aura of romanticized dysfunction extends to the entire community, seen drunkenly and communally weathering an allegorical storm and subsequent flood. Presumably the beasts in question aren’t just Hushpuppy’s half-imagined pack of enormous prehistoric wild boars (set free from that melted ice), but also the central characters themselves—poor, black, modernity-deprived, and too-preciously resilient. In which case, are we not saying that they are animals? At any rate they are marginal to our society, and best kept that way, so as to be fawned over through a magic movie magnifying glass.

To authenticate his and Alibar’s laboriously folkloric calculations, Zeitlin uses nonprofessional actors. Good idea, as the last thing this needs is actors seeming actorly. But playing with regular folks can, and does, backfire because, well, they’re not professional actors. Not helping matters, Wallis gets a voiceover narration full of aphoristic wisdom and philosophy-jive, which only betrays the great cinematic discovery of her face and unflatteringly emphasizes the film’s theatrical origins. As for originality, it’s here, but in quotation marks.
Preferring pseudo-mythology to political seriousness, this amounts to a flamboyant indomitable-spirit demonstration, with undeniable vitality, but also a sort of heavy, beastly dullness. Zeitlin has talent and guts, yes. Ultimately, though, he inspires not wonder or awe so much as our awareness of the pride he takes in his own presentation.

Beasts of the Southern Wild/ PG-13, 93 minutes/Vinegar Hill Theatre