Author: jonathankiefer

The eternal city hosts an aspiring cast that includes Alessandro Tiberi, Roberto Della Casa, and Penélope Cruz in Woody Allen’s To Rome With Love. (Sony Pictures Classics)

For some of us, Woody Allen could film the phone book and we’d find pleasure in it: How nice all those listings might look in his signature white-on-black Windsor typeface. Poignancy, too: The phone book, like the Woody Allen movie, doesn’t seem as useful to as many people as it once did. But, after a bracing Midnight in Paris, he’s off To Rome With Love. The new film faintly tingles with unfocused quasi-recollections of earlier movies and motifs. At times it even seems vaguely demented, and might be a test to determine whether we’ll just stand politely by as Allen finally descends, doddering, into the void. At other times, though, that same quality reads as invitingly dreamy. This is Fellini country, after all.

The tales, very loosely interwoven, are these: Beset one morning by a random mob of paparazzi, a middle-class Roman everyman and self-described schmuck (Roberto Benigni) becomes suddenly famous for no apparent reason. Getting to know the fiancé (Flavio Parenti) of their daughter (Alison Pill), a retired American opera director (Allen) and his psychiatrist wife (Judy Davis) discover the fiancé’s mortician father (Fabio Armiliato) to be a world-class tenor—who can only sing in the shower. Honeymooning provincial newlyweds (Alessandro Tiberi, Alessandra Mastronardi) find themselves separated by the respective temptations of a call girl (Penélope Cruz) and a movie star (Antonio Albanese). An American architect (Alec Baldwin) revisits bittersweet memories of youthful romantic missteps, as evidently replayed before his eyes by Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig, and Ellen Page.

Baldwin seems the most at ease, maybe from having been in similarly muted magical-realist territory before, as the wisecracking apparition of an affectionate ex-lover visible only to Mia Farrow in Allen’s Alice. Certainly he comports himself more casually than the younger American actors here who nearly choke on Allen’s generationally anachronistic dialogue. The Italians, and Cruz, suffer mild translation losses too, although it’s also clear that Benigni hasn’t had as much fun working up a Roman riff since he played the compulsively confessional taxi driver in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth.

The aspiration to work with Allen has become automatic among contemporary actors, who reportedly do so on the condition that they see only those portions of script in which their characters appear. The risk of such auteurist dominion is that all big-picture views, then, are privileged and purposely myopic: An assistant director deals with production scheduling, not narrative consistency; a script supervisor monitors only the minutiae of continuity between takes; and an editor’s efforts necessarily aim for Allen’s final approval. Meanwhile, keeping busy in front of the camera as well as behind it, might well leave Allen too distracted or exhausted to tidy up expositional false starts and loose ends, not to mention meager ideas and misfired jokes. It shouldn’t be a problem for a filmmaker with so much experience, but Allen has a way of making seniority seem like complacency.

But look: The routines are merely perpetual. It’s the city that’s eternal.

Keira Knightley and Steve Carell have no future in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. (Focus Features)

What do we know from movies about the apocalypse? Obviously not very much, or else they wouldn’t keep repeating it. This might suggest some existential panic, but a case could be made that variation on the theme is inherently hopeful. Human extinction might well be both inevitable and deserved, for instance, but why shouldn’t the prospect also be funny and romantic? Seeking a Friend for the End of the World says that maybe it should.

This is a movie about what happens when, with armageddon at hand and nothing better left to do, two lost souls take a road trip, toward each other. Dodge is a forlorn, tastefully sweatered, spousally abandoned American insurance salesman of middle age, played by Steve Carell. His young English neighbor Penny, played by Keira Knightley, is a quasi-exotic free spirit, and as much a readymade fetish object as the collected vinyl records she conspicuously cherishes. With only dire straits in common, Penny and Dodge may, yet, teach each other bittersweet things about how to live on severe deadline.

It begins promisingly, with the end duly announced. Life-obliterating asteroid en route, last ditch aversion effort failed (there was a space shuttle called “Deliverance,” but it didn’t make it), little left to do but wait. And like the song says, the waiting is the hardest part. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is the sort of movie for which the awareness of a song having said something becomes more important than the effort to say something else. Maybe that’s typical for Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist screenwriter Lorene Scafaria, here making her directorial debut and again imposing music appreciation as both a characterization crutch and a lure for audiences amenable to sentimental movies putting on snappy indie airs.

Standing pigeon-toed in her Converse, chin-length hair gently crimped, eyes warm and wet with tears half the time, Knightley looks lovely and precious. She’s throwing her heart into this, but her bag-of-tricks acting needs more rigorous direction. Carell meanwhile carries his straitlaced, suburban chic with dapper aplomb, but his reliance on wistful, hangdog humor smacks of calculation. It’s intentionally funny when another character takes Dodge for an assassin, on account of the latter’s “vague way” and “detached look,” but the laugh feels more like a shiver; Carell’s deadpan appeals for empathy sometimes seem almost sociopathic.

Other actors come and go, in the way people do from our lives: peculiarly, sometimes vividly, often too quickly. It’s still the Dodge and Penny show. Like all romantic movie leads, they’re audience projection receptors, soaking up our pangs of regret about missed chances and our yearnings for some fuck-it-all escape.

Scafaria compensates for clunky plot advancement with scenery variation. As glib, remorseless chuckles give way to genuine heartstring tugs, the movie drags. Hey, maybe that’s a genre coup: Does it count as apocalypse aversion when the end is not nigh enough?

Obviously pluralism is a high priority for Madagascar 3. Featuring the voices of Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Sacha Baron Cohen, Cedric the Entertainer, Andy Richter, Bryan Cranston, Jessica Chastain, and Martin Short, this is the one about the lion, the zebra, the hippo, and the giraffe, along with three lemurs, a few penguins, and several chimps, who join up with a Siberian tiger, a cheetah, and a sea lion, among several other creatures great and small, in order to make their way through Europe and home to New York.

Even at the conception level, this latest overcrowded ark to roll off the DreamWorks Animation assembly-line is highly pluralistic; it was directed by three people and written by two. Perhaps as a concession to efficiency, one of the two writers is also one of the three directors, Eric Darnell, who’s been with the Madagascar movies since they began, in 2005, and now seems quite at ease, inasmuch as his individual contribution can be determined. The other writer, whose individual contribution seems theoretically more conspicuous, is Noah Baumbach, the occasional Wes Anderson collaborator, adapter of a Jonathan Franzen novel for TV, and purveyor of highbrow independent comedy films full of family-unfriendly jokes.

Possibly it was Baumbach who came up with the villain of the piece, a nominally human animal-control gendarme (with the voice of Frances McDormand) whose first meeting with our heroes in Monte Carlo prompts an almost rabidly obsessive rampage to hunt them down. Leaping between Riviera rooftops and running through hotel walls, waving around a hand saw with which she hopes to ready the lion’s head for her trophy wall, she pauses only to rouse her understandably hospitalized subordinates with a mascara-running rendition of “Non, Je Ne Regret Rien.”

The whole movie is kind of like that: noisy, colorful, sometimes spectacularly remorseless, and not at all interested in slowing down. It has the sort of manic madcap pace—full of dovetailed gags— that feigns respect for your intelligence, but really is an awkward panic about its lack of inspiration, or at least a bid to make you think you’ll also be needing the DVD. But, it also has some nice touches, like the ring of fire burning in the tiger’s eyes—first with fury at a painful memory, then with determination to conquer it—or the deliriously one-sided affair between the lemur voiced by Baron Cohen and a dumb drooling bear in a tutu, whose tiny bicycle he eventually replaces with a Ducati.

Anyway, the gang evades its insane pursuer by hiding out with a proudly traditional (read: relevance-challenged) trans-European circus, paying its way in the currency of American style: borderline-disingenuous zeal, pseudo-novelty, bright vulgarity. See? Something for everybody!

In 1979, the crew of the space vessel Nostromo came upon a shipwreck, in whose cockpit sat the fossilized corpse of a giant man with his guts blown inside out. What was that all about, the crew briefly wondered, until one of them had his own guts blown out and there was their monstrous answer, along with the start of a long-standing if similarly self-eviscerating science-fiction franchise.

So everybody got distracted, and nobody ever bothered to inquire about the identity of the big guy in the cockpit. But now the crew of the space vessel Prometheus has a chance to look into that, and to append the franchise with a new beginning. What does it mean that their ship is named for a titan who got himself gutted for doing humanity a big favor once? Nothing, really, except an assurance that we are again among the greatest of the epic belly-bursters.

The director is Ridley Scott, who more or less invented the modern sci-fi horror genre with that first Alien film, and has now warmed it over with Prometheus for no apparent reason other than the privilege of stealing back his own fire. Scott’s reclamation, expectedly engorged with pomposity and meticulous production values, seems necessary only because after so much hype it now just needs to be done with. And maybe you could also say it revisits an age-old cosmological conundrum, asking: “Will slick design one day be able to make up for a lack of soul?”

Sure, there’s a firmly commanded style, and a technically impressive equilibrium between the sleekly gadgety and the grotesquely suppurating, but so what? Before long it’s hard to tell between specific familiar franchise bits and general genre clichés, or to want to. Screenwriters Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof somehow turn a surplus of expositon into a shortage of clarity. There’s a lot of spelling out that amounts to muddled nonsense.

Did you actually want to know about the characters? One of them, played by Noomi Rapace, is supposed to be a researcher who must reconcile her religious beliefs with perplexing evidence of humankind’s cosmic origins. When that fails, mostly because the movie can’t sustain its pretended interest, she must instead reconcile the regressive mandate to pose in gauzy underwear with a more urgent and comparatively progressive gynecological proactiveness. (You’ll see.) Meanwhile Michael Fassbender, as the inscrutable onboard android, gives a conspicuous homage to Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, a lofty model of cool masochism.

Everyone else is expendable, but not always in a grimly satisfying way. And that goes for the aliens too. It turns out the first movie was right to not bother inquiring as to the identity of the big guy in the cockpit. So maybe you’ve got to hand it to Scott for engineering this decades-deferred anticlimax with such straight-faced panache. So, how about a sequel?

Like so much Christmas crap in the drugstore on the day after Halloween, the summer movie season comes on too early and too strong. As if the best cure for impulse-buyer’s remorse is another sales blitz. Well, maybe it is, if you’re O.K. with The Avengers and Dark Shadows and half a dozen other “summer movies” having been in theaters for months by the time the season officially arrives. And so this summer movie preview takes the form of a pop quiz. A tiredly familiar yet still self-congratulating format —but also a mercifully gentle segue (it’s multiple choice) into sustained respite from actual mental labor.

1. Using the Franchise Repopulation Profitability Theorem, calculate the percentage change of projected box office revenue for each casting decision below.
A) Colin Farrell in a role once played by Arnold Schwarzenegger (Total Recall, August 3)
B) Andrew Garfield in a role thrice played by Tobey Maguire (The Amazing Spider-Man, June 30)
C) Jeremy Renner in a role similar to one thrice played by Matt Damon (The Bourne Legacy, August 3)
D) Jesse Eisenberg in every role played by Woody Allen (To Rome With Love, June 22)
ANSWER: Whatever. Yeah, there’s no such theorem. Leave the math to the studio bean counters.

2. Just what is Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (June 8), anyway?
A) A science-fiction film starring Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Noomi Rapace, and Charlize Theron, which has something to do with Scott’s other film, Alien, but is not officially a prequel thereto.
B) A fictional movie adaptation of America’s No.1 bestselling pregnancy guide.
C) The demigod who gave us fire, for which he was punished by having his liver eaten by an eagle and then becoming the property of 20th Century Fox.
D) Actually just another really elaborate commercial for some new Apple product.
ANSWER: A.

3. Which of the following scenarios describes the plot of Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane’s feature directorial debut, Ted (July 13)?
A) A popular annual conference devoted to “ideas worth spreading” is seized by double entendres, each revealed through a dynamic cutaway.
B) A biopic about the late senator Edward Kennedy that’s also a drinking game, whose dialogue prompts include, most frequently, the word “Chappaquiddick.”
C) Mark Wahlberg plays a man whose relationship with his girlfriend, played by Mila Kunis, is jeopardized by his relationship with a talking Teddy bear, voiced by MacFarlane.
D) Two old pals—played by Ted Danson and Ted Nugent, both in blackface—go on a cross-country road trip to reconnect with each other and themselves.
ANSWER: C.

4. What do Chernobyl Diaries (May 25), a thriller in which comely young tourists find trouble at the former site of a nuclear disaster, and Rock of Ages (June 15), a juke-box musical set in the heyday of glam metal and starring Tom Cruise, have in common?
A) Both somehow required three screenwriters.
B) Both are needless and likely tasteless reminders of the horrors of the 1980s.
C) Both celebrate the power of the human spirit.
D) A and B.
ANSWER: D.

The tale of how Admiral General Aladeen became President Prime Minister Admiral General Aladeen is not one for the ages. As told by The Dictator, it is basically the story of a flabby political farce about oppressive narcissism meandering uncertainly into romantic comedy.
Sacha Baron Cohen not being your go-to guy for rom-com is one reason to find it amusing. Another is the notion of rapacious world leader as portrayed by a chronic boundary overstepper. Neither is quite reason enough, but the movie does have its funny moments, and also grace enough to get itself over in less than an hour and a half.

Hailing from the fictive oil-rich North African nation of Wadiya, Aladeen lives large among gold-plated Humvees and nuclear ambitions, by day ordering capricious executions and by night adding snapshots of celebrity sexual conquests to his wall of Polaroids. (Quick, mute cameos are among the movie’s deadlier weapons.) And yet, for all his prowess, he goes woefully uncuddled.

Then he goes to New York, where he finds himself betrayed by a senior advisor (Ben Kingsley), kidnapped by an American agent (John C. Reilly), replaced by a simpleton (Baron Cohen again), reunited with a sacked scientist countryman (Jason Mantzoukas) who’s now a Mac Genius (“Mostly I clean semen out of laptops,” the disgruntled former subordinate reports), and accommodated by the peace-activist manager of Brooklyn co-op (Anna Faris), who neither shaves her armpits nor seems to mind being called “lesbian hobbit” or “little boy in a chemo wig.”

This is a lot for our dictator to take in, and many possibilities glitter before him. Democratization is afoot, at least in the sense that Baron Cohen is an equal-opportunity vulgarizer: With this brazen autocrat thus ensconced in a stronghold of the smugly progressive, the way is paved for duelling caricatures of entitled, adolescent-minded tyrants. Dully, the result is a draw —more like a knockoff of some Adam Sandler movie, with requisite tugs at heartstrings and other body parts. (Although admittedly the masturbation montage, complete with footage of Forrest Gump in physical epiphany, is inspired.)

The director is Larry Charles, who also directed Baron Cohen in Borat and Brüno before this, mostly by turning him loose like a bull in the China shop of how we live now. The Dictator, too, is situational and vaguely improvisatory, but also obviously scripted and rehearsed. It’s culture-clash ambush with the safety left on. Adding a despot to Baron Cohen’s stable of blustery imbeciles seemed nervy and necessary, but the resulting movie does not. Earlier, his way of taking aim at too-easy targets made us complicit in their exploitation, and that’s just the sort of tension this effort needs and lacks.

Although dedicated “in loving memory of Kim Jong Il,” The Dictator also recalls Charlie Chaplin, who in 1940 saw history coming and sezied a very specific opportunity with The Great Dictator. Both movies culminate in big speeches—Chaplin’s a portentous refutation of earlier silence, Baron Cohen’s, oppositely, a rally for autocracy that’s really a sly critique of debased democracy. In this toothless, talking-points satire we see how history advances: from the heart-on-sleeve to the nearly heartless.

Upon arrival at The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, its first guests cannot conceal their disappointment. “You Photoshopped it!” one says, aghast at how shabby the place looks when compared with its enticing pamphlet. “I offered a vision of the future,” replies the beaming young manager, apparently believing his own PR.

Fine, but time is running out on the future, and for that matter, so is money. Those first guests are seven British retirees who’ve been compelled, for various reasons, to outsource their retirement. Evelyn (Judi Dench), recently widowed, has been left in debt and had to sell her London flat. Muriel (Maggie Smith), a grouchy bigot, needs a cheap new hip. The Ainslies, Douglas and Jean (Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton), went broke bankrolling their daughter’s failed startup. Graham (Tom Wilkinson), a just-retired high court judge, lived in India once before and has returned with a regretful memory of lost love. Madge (Celia Imrie), merely hopes for one last chance at romance, while Norman (Ronald Pickup) hopes for one more one night stand, followed if possible by another and then another.

So here they all are in Jaipur, in decline. This setup smacks of post-colonial apologia, but apparently some internal consensus determined that to be too taxing. Why not take things easier, and limit ourselves to a diverting little rally for affirmation over resignation? True, his name is Sonny and he’s played with deferential mania by the kid from Slumdog Millionaire, but our young manager (Dev Patel) is just so sincere about his entrepreneurial ambition—which by the way, seeks a diversified clientele made up not only of doddering Brits but also people from “many other countries where they don’t like old people too.”

As adapted by Ol Parker from Deborah Moggach’s novel These Foolish Things, and stocked with that posh ensemble, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel offers the familiar charms of poise and eloquence as trade-offs to any discomfiting residue of imperial impulse. And it gives director John Madden, most famously of Shakespeare In Love, everything he needs to mount a sturdy counter-programming campaign against early-onset summer blockbusters. For moviegoers of a certain age, unconcerned about demographic reductionism so long as it’s within their own demographic, this’ll do nicely.

Although it sometimes strains credulity, the slightly crowded story also has strong sparks of life, as when Douglas and Jean discover their marriage eroded, by clashing world views, beyond the safety of politeness; or, especially, when Graham tells Evelyn about his history here, in a stunningly subtle duet scene that seems about as good as movie acting gets.
Madden manages a baseline of human decency, and therefore comes by his affirmations honestly enough. Like its namesake, the movie itself too readily courts to the unnatural gloss of the would-be tourist trap, and it needs a little time to get over that. Agreed, it could use some sprucing up, but even as-is this is not the worst Exotic Marigold Hotel.

Even in our dimmest memories of the original “Dark Shadows” TV show, the reluctant vampire Barnabas Collins stands out. He wasn’t a major player at first, but he had a way of chomping at the imagination and not letting go.

Now it should be no surprise to find him in the form of Johnny Depp, who shines, albeit pallidly, in Tim Burton’s over-the-top take on the late-’60s supernatural soap. Nor should it shock us to find the literary mash-up maestro Seth Grahame-Smith, also of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and of course Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, stuffing this fish-out-of-water fable into an occasionally hilarious but highly uneven script.

Returning in 1972 after two entombed centuries to his coastal Maine homestead, and to an amorous feud with a spurned jealous witch (Eva Green), Depp’s blue-blooded bloodsucker yearns for his true love (Bella Heathcote), befriends his baffled descendants (Michelle Pfeiffer, Jonny Lee Miller, Chloë Grace Moretz, Gulliver McGrath), and piques the interest of their in-house shrink (Helena Bonham Carter). Also, and with regrets, he kills some folks—a few construction workers here, a few hippies there—but only because he must.

People, including Depp, tend to regard Barnabas with varying degrees of wised-up apprehension. Early on we detect a potential epitome of the subgenre—that gentle, goofy depravity—that Burton and Depp have built together, as if the likes of Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood, partly inspired by the “Dark Shadows” show in the first place, had just been rehearsals for this. But what is this, exactly? The highest possible camp in the lowest possible key? Something striking, at any rate, full of fine timing and decorous visual touches—and ultimately about as superficial as a detailed doodle in some morbidly precocious loner-schoolboy’s notebook. Great!

Only from here it doesn’t go so well, instead becoming overburdened by arbitrary-seeming obligation—to plot, or to summer movie spectacle, or to the artfully sallow Burton-Depp subgenre itself, who knows? The movie gets out of control and gradually degenerates, but not in a good way. Soon enough, the real fish out of water seems to be the director himself, blurring its own otherwise beguiling camp-gothic clarity like a tired, tiresome, word-slurring drunk. Pathos might have been possible here, were it not all so carefully prepackaged.
Given such an exquisite collaboration between cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel and production designer Rick Heinrichs, it’s hard to begrudge Burton’s transcendence of the show’s semi-shoddy, no-budget aesthetic. More problematic as that climactic contrivance and giddy overacting don’t agree with everyone else in the cast, which also includes Jackie Earle Haley, as the nitwit Collins mansion caretaker, and Alice Cooper as himself.

But at the core of it all, irrevocably, is Depp’s soulful deadpan. His Barnabas gives off a certain adorably hapless hauteur—like a great snapshot of a cat forced to wear a Halloween costume—which might be all Dark Shadows ever needed.