Author: jonathankiefer

First, it must be understood that the Nick and Norah, proprietors of this infinite playlist, are of no discernible relation to Nick and Nora Charles from Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Thin Man, which became a series of six boozily banter-intensive movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy in the ’30s and ’40s.

This has be explained up front because movie critics like to feel important, which means making you wait for the information you came here for by spouting off about how nobody in Nick & Norah’s target demographic has heard of the Thin Man movies anyway, damn kids, with their Twitter-frazzled attention spans.

It is possible, however, that five more movies like this one will fill the coming years—that, indeed, by decade’s end there’ll be a whole Netflix subcategory of Teen Movies With Squiggly Hand-Drawn Opening Credits and Alt-Pop Soundtracks and Michael Cera.

The first such film was Juno, in which Cera impregnated a 16-year-old girl and then revealed himself to be geekily adorable to her. In Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, he’s still rocking that whole “geekily adorable” concept, but his mission here is to get over getting dumped by one young lady and woo and satisfy another who’s never had an orgasm. What a trooper, this guy.

Not to say Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist is a mere sex comedy, although, as Cera’s Nick complains early on to the gay mates in his queercore band, the Jerk Offs, “You don’t know what it’s like to be straight, O.K.? It’s awful.” Magnanimously, they take him out for a night on the town, first to play a gig and then to track down a secret show by an indie-kid-approved band called Where’s Fluffy?

The town is New York, and it’s looking good. For starters, parking is never a problem. Plus, there’s Norah (Kat Dennings), a softly sarcastic beauty with a mysterious, plot-relevant way of being waved in by bouncers at every club she visits.

She’s the one who’s orgasmically challenged, yes, and Nick’s mates (Aaron Yoo and Rafi Gavron) figure she’s the one for him. And of course the movie, adapted by Lorene Scafaria from Rachel Cohn and David Levithan’s young-adult novel and directed by Peter Sollett, of the well-liked 2003 NYC-teen-drama Raising Victor Vargas, wants us to agree.

It’s just that Nick’s still not over Tris (Alexis Dziena), the bitchy blonde with no shortage of makeup and confidence and no surplus of wit and taste, whom Norah happens to despise.
 
And so, bring on the night. Our titular clubbers’ courtship is a halting one, flitting between vignettes and containing minor obstacles. What Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist lacks in dramatic structure it almost makes up for in good casting and  chatty, light-romancey charm. And, of course, the Infinite Playlist playlist, though finite, contains the likes of Devendra Banhart, Vampire Weekend, Band of Horses, and an original score by Mark Mothersbaugh, the Michael Cera of film composers.

Though it will find its audience, this movie doesn’t seem like a signature work for Sollett, not in the same way two movies it evokes, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, did for their directors. But what do these damn kids today care about those old relics anyway?

Is it weird that so many fall movies are turning racial charges into high concepts? Gary Fleder’s The Express could be just another college-football drama, except it’s about the first black man to win the Heisman Trophy. Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna could be a standard-issue World War II movie, except it’s about black American soldiers. Lance Hammer’s Ballast could be the gritty drama of a poor black family in the Mississippi River Delta, except it’s a strikingly naturalistic one—so underplayed that the lack of concept becomes the concept.

And then there’s Neil Labute’s Lakeview Terrace, which could be a prefab thriller about a bigot making trouble for the young, mixed-race couple moving into his genteel neighborhood, except the bigot is a cop, and black. What this means, yes, is that Lakeview Terrace is basically Guess Who meets Unlawful Entry.

Sure, putting it in pitch-meeting-ese may seem reductive, but then, combining the basic genetic material of the 2005 race-reversed Bernie Mac-Ashton Kutcher remake of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner with the 1992 bad-cop drama (or bad cop-drama; either way) starring Kurt Russell and Ray Liotta is not an endeavor any sane person would describe as “too easy.”

Of course, hardness suits Labute, who began in movies by adapting his own knife-like play In the Company of Men, and is known for moral pugnacity, which comes through even when the script isn’t his. (In Lakeview Terrace, it’s David Loughery and Howard Korder’s.) And of course, perhaps most importantly, the cop here—a tough L.A.P.D. veteran and widower whose upper-middle class homestead seems especially hard-won —is played by Samuel L. Jackson.

This man knows the meaning of service, of hardship, of heroism. He has been through some things. Like snakes on a plane. How will he handle a well-meaning, Prius-driving, Utne Reader-subscribing Wonder Bread-white Berkeley graduate with a black wife in suburbia?

Not well.

Jackson’s Officer Abel Turner has been ruling the roost to which Malcolm X’s chickens came home, as a resented-disciplinarian single father of two kids, a brash, borderline and brutal inner-city patrolman and an unsolicited one-man neighborhood watch. He’s not at all pleased when Chris and Lisa Mattson (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) move in next door, and especially not when they get busy in their pool, unwittingly within view of Abel’s kids.

It’s no surprise that hostilities escalate, although they do play out, at least at first, in surprising ways. The movie wants to challenge not just our received ideas about race but also about family, marriage and manhood. It allows for some unsettling depends-how-you-look-at-it complexity. Nagging questions linger about the true depths of Abel’s hostility and whether faux-magnanimous white liberal guilt will be Chris’ only defense. And, as it turns out, the progressive idyll of the Mattsons’ marriage was showing signs of strain to begin with.

So it’s too bad that Lakeview Terrace can’t keep from straitjacketing itself within a tired thriller format. Take the convenient removal of Abel’s kids from the equation; or the ruinous spelling out of his backstory; or the allegorically obvious California wildfire encroaching on the neighborhood in direct rhythmic proportion to the friction combusting within it. Take those things, or leave them; all that remains is a concept.

One thing that may not have occurred to you about the Heimlich Maneuver is that, during a crisis, it is at the very least a reliable way of being held. That’s how Choke’s Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) sees it, anyway. And just because Victor is a fatherless, sex-addicted med school dropout who solicits bankable pity from diners at upscale restaurants by pretending to let them rescue him from choking doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

He uses that pity money to keep his demented mother (Anjelica Huston) cared for in a Catholic nursing home, whose staff Victor beds, or wants to (yes, he even imagines nuns nude), and whose patients’ own confused traumatic memories he indulges. It’s sweet, the way he gives them closure, says the young lady (Kelly Macdonald) who appears to be his mother’s most attentive attending physician. You can bet Victor wants to get with her, too.

Anyway, Victor’s best pal by default is his fellow addict and roommate Denny (Brad William Henke), the kind of guy who woos a stripper by sketching her portrait and who can’t resist pleasuring himself to an old photo of Victor’s mom. When Victor does manage to get himself to support group meetings, it’s mostly just to screw his sponsee on the bathroom floor. You think that’s bad? It gets worse: He has a day job as a professional historical reenactor. What kind of sick bastard is this guy?

The kind who springs forth from the affectedly depraved comedic stylings of novelist Chuck Palahniuk, who sees right through the polite veneer of our fucked-up world and believes in the redemptive power of adolescent spitefulness posing as sociopathy. Naturally. When director David Fincher made a film and a sensation of his novel Fight Club in 1999, Palahniuk just about became a household name, albeit not an easy one to pronounce, and the movie version of Choke, produced by Charlottesville’s own ATO Pictures and adapted by actor Clark Gregg for his directorial debut, has been highly anticipated ever since.

The self-described cultists can talk amongst themselves about this movie’s omissions and distortions of its source, but there’s no question of its basic fidelity to Palahniuk’s pet themes—particularly that memory and imagination, especially where trauma is concerned, are subjective and selective.

Thus, as in Fight Club, just when a significant plot turn starts to seem bogus, along comes an unexpected twist to explain and justify it—unexpected, that is, because the twist itself is so bogus, so obvious, that you never thought the story actually would go through with it. Well, sure enough. All of this is hard to discuss without giving anything away; suffice to say the plot turn in question actually is not the one involving Jesus’ foreskin.

Otherwise, with Huston doing the familiarly dodgy yet deep-feeling matriarch routine and Rockwell reading Victor’s mix of self-loathing and self-congratulation with a leisurely bemusement that makes him sound like a lost Wilson brother, some viewers may be left wondering what kind of unequivocal breakthrough or failure Choke would’ve been had Wes Anderson directed it.

Gregg, for his part (and he plays a part, too, as Victor’s priggish, Colonialese-spouting boss and unlikely romantic rival), does O.K. Maybe he’ll lose points for lacking Fincher’s slickly overwrought style, but that works to the movie’s advantage. It’s a credit to Gregg’s discretion that Victor’s (mercifully few) choking scenes play out with more discomfiting intimacy than his drolly cynical sex scenes.

But to call yourself a true fan of rebelliously anti-mainstream transgressive solipsism, track down Caveh Zahedi’s I Am a Sex Addict, which makes for a proper Choke chaser.

You can take the movie’s title in a number of ways. As spy jargon, of course—an order to protect top secret information by ensuring that no eyes but your own ever will see it. Or as a spectacular critical rebuke, to a document so aggressively disposable that the disposal itself should be aggressive, punitive, scorching. Or maybe just as a warning, that reading the thing will give you some kind of terrible rash.

In any case, Burn After Reading, the new comedy from writer-producer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen, is well titled. It’s fair to call it a grim farce about vanity in an age of constant surveillance, but that might imply more ambition than the movie itself does.

From C.I.A. spook to Coen Brothers kook: George Clooney joins a starry, starry cast in the Coen’s return to comedic capers, Burn After Reading.

An alcoholic, apparently complacent C.I.A. analyst, played by John Malkovich, gets pushed out of his job. Then he gets pushed out of his marriage to an icy pediatrician, played by Tilda Swinton, who’s having an affair with George Clooney, as a fidgety federal marshal who can’t manage his appetite for women but can at least boast (in just such a way as to telegraph future plot turns) that he’s never discharged his weapon in 20 years of service.

And before poor Malkovich can figure out how to begin his tell-all memoir (or “mem-wah” in his affected and telling pronunciation), he gets pushed out of his stately Georgetown home, too. All the while he gets pushed around—or, well, nudged, at least—by a pair of would-be blackmailers, played by Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt, who find a disc of inchoate notes toward the mem-wah on a locker room floor at the gym where they work.

These two seem about as suited to extortion as their victim seems suited to a second career as an author—not at all. She’s only in it to raise money for the cosmetic-surgery overhaul she hopes will improve her online dating prospects; he’s in it presumably because he’s a shallow dummy who needs a hobby.

And off they all go. It’s a regression from the Coens’ fine, award-laden adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men, but to some eyes perhaps a return to form: the standard-issue Coen comedy, full of resigned nihilism and profanity, with the usual myopically self-interested cartoon characters to whom the filmmakers mostly condescend. For one thing, the movie rudely aborts every one of its characters’ arcs—some, like Richard Jenkins’ thankless part as McDormand’s boss and secret admirer, before they’ve even really begun.

And with so many clever comedic moments handled as throwaways, Burn After Reading seems so proud of its restraint that it gets distracted from the business of actually building up to something, then just makes a joke of its own distraction. Thankfully, at least, this last duty falls to a perfectly cast J.K. Simmons as a perplexed C.I.A. chief, who gamely delivers a short shot of deadpan brilliance.

Still, the movie belongs to Malkovich, too appropriate as a guy who’s let down by and fed up with all around him and who deserves better. Indeed, Burn After Reading is no No Country, but it’s no Big Lebowski either. Like the meaning of its title, its stature within the Coen continuum is for you to decide.

Assuming our intelligence can be trusted, the way Traitor came to pass is this: Steve Martin, while in the throes of Bringing Down the House, had an idea for an espionage thriller. (In retrospect, it’s easy to imagine how, during that particular production, his mind might have wandered.) It involved an undercover U.S. military operative deep into war-on-terror territory in the Middle East, possibly at the center of an international conspiracy and on the run from terrorists and feds alike. And it ended with a major twist.

Martin told his idea to a producer, who is said to have liked it, but then hired Jeffrey Nachmanoff—co-writer of the glum, dumb The Day After Tomorrow—to assemble a screenplay and direct. Still, Nachmanoff had his own twist to offer, making the protagonist both a Muslim and an American, deeply conflicted about his actions. Then Don Cheadle read the script and wanted in.

Double agent Don Cheadle resurrects some of his Ocean’s 11 sneak skills for Traitor.

And now that Traitor is done, it seems like puffing it up with commercial viability also was a way of watering down its premise. The clever maneuver of the ending remains, and the rest of the movie feels ultimately too much like a theoretical exercise for setting up that debatably surprising twist.

Cheadle plays the undercover operative, a Sudan-born Muslim American named Samir Horn, who speaks several languages and counts both mujahideen and the U.S. Army among his affiliations. But, as he puts it, the one authority to whom he answers is Allah.

The movie begins with Samir selling explosives to jihadists in Yemen, then getting arrested with them and accused of being a traitor who sold them out. It may or may not help that two FBI agents (Guy Pearce and Neal McDonough) seem to consider Samir a person of interest, and come to interrogate him in the Yemeni prison.

They offer freedom in exchange for vital information, but Samir would rather stay put, standing up to a jail yard thug and playing chess with fellow inmate Omar (Said Taghmaoui), who eventually includes him in a prison break and in a terrorist network with plans for havoc in Europe and the U.S.

Plots thicken, blood spills, Jeff Daniels surfaces as a shady CIA lifer, and all the major players find themselves embroiled in a race against time and an impending attack involving terrorists on U.S. buses. It becomes clear that, when he finally answers to his one authority, Samir will have much to answer for indeed.

So it’s a good thing Cheadle supplies the needed moral heft here, because Nachmanoff doesn’t have much to offer. The characters register only faintly—less like the multidimensional people Nachmanoff’s script pretends them to be and more like placeholders in a gimmicky but ultimately simple procedural political thriller. 

To its credit, the movie moves swiftly enough to briefly distract from its own hackneyed conventionality. But disappointments and doubts can’t be held off for long.

Had Steve Martin taken the reins of Traitor himself, it might have evolved into a bravely bitter and affecting black comedy. Or maybe it would’ve turned into its own highly lethal sort of suicide bomb. But Martin played it safe by handing his concept over to the Hollywood machine. In this modern age of morally ambiguous entertainment, whether that amounts to a high crime will depend on how much treason the American public can tolerate.

Doesn’t it seem like Rainn Wilson’s whole career is derivative? Be honest: It’s really only thanks to his turn as Dwight on “The Office,” a British show borrowed and overplayed by American TV, that you even know who he is. And what is that worth? Wilson finally having earned enough name recognition to score the sort of shallowly funny musical man-boy star vehicle that by now seems like a Hollywood hand-me-down.

Actually, all of this might work to his advantage in The Rocker, in which lateness to the table is the main concept. Here Wilson goes all out for underdog empathy, playing not even a has-been, but a wasn’t-quite. Here he is as Robert “Fish” Fishman, a schlubby, tubby Clevelander and erstwhile drummer for the burgeoning leopard-skin-and-power-chord concern known as Vesuvius.

From TV to film: Rainn Wilson gets out of “The Office” and guns for some underdog empathy in The Rocker.

Twenty years after getting dumped by the band, Fish finds himself also getting dumped by his girlfriend, and by his boss, and moving in, unwanted, to his sister’s attic. There he sits and seethes, what with Vesuvius having succeeded without him and somehow sustained its success even after its cultural moment obviously has passed. But Fish’s teen nephew Matt (Josh Gad) has a band too, and they need a drummer.

The prom is their first gig, which Fish blows by spazzing into an inappropriate solo during “In Your Eyes.” But before long, with devil horns perpetually hoisted, he’s ably pep-talking moody front man Curtis (Teddy Geiger), wooing Curtis’ mom (a warm, wised-up Christina Applegate), and prompting dour bassist Amelia (Emma Stone) to decide that an “ancient, crazy-faces-making rocker” actually is just the sort of drummer this band needs.

He does make real contributions. It’s Fish’s idea, for instance, to change the line “I’m so bitter” into “I’m not bitter” and speed up that song’s tempo. Up-tempo is the order of the day: Soon enough comes the label contract, the tour montage, the half-assed, highly moviefied dichotomy between rock-star life and real life, and other stock conflicts.

Screenwriters Wally Wolodarsky and Maya Forbes (working from Ryan Jaffe’s story) have solid TV-comedy credentials, and director Peter Cattaneo at least knew how to enliven situational clowning in The Full Monty. But in The Rocker, they all seem to assume that the audience knows the drill anyway, so there’s really no point in bothering with many details beyond the simple framework for Wilson’s funny minutiae.

And so, within its genre, The Rocker registers as a minor work. But this is the comedy of pop-cultural nostalgia and stunted adolescence we’re talking about. This is the fairy tale of a hair-band hanger-on who at long last has his chance to really rock—or at least to really support a few bars of adequate, innocuous, radio-ready power pop.

To those moviegoers who may have said they’re sick of seeing Will Ferrell or Jack Black just keep doing what they do, well, O.K. then, here’s somebody else doing it.

One day it might mean something to go to bat for this movie—and, by extension, for Rainn Wilson—in the same way that it takes courage to whip out the Warrant and White Lion when everybody else is safely on the retro bandwagon with Poison and the Crüe.

Ultimately, The Rocker may do an invaluable cultural service, by separating the true posers from the wannabes.

Tropic Thunder introduces its main characters through fake trailers for the entertainment properties that made them famous: Tugg Speedman (director, co-producer and co-writer Ben Stiller) has been muscling his way through a lobotomized franchise of apocalyptic action flicks; Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.) is an Australian Oscar-magnet method actor much adored for disappearing into his own bathos; Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) does a fourth-rate Eddie Murphy bit with fat suits and flatulence; and Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson) hocks “Booty Sweat” energy drinks through his chart-topping hip-hop anthem, “I Love Tha Pussy.”

These swift bits are of course clever and funny and craftily done. And perchance a little risky, too, for they plant the seed of a notion, before the movie itself has even officially begun, that maybe Tropic Thunder might have been better realized merely as one of these fake trailers, or its own real one—a concept best articulated as a glorified highlight reel, without even the pretense of dramatic structure or narrative coherence.

Funny, or just plain Tet offensive? Ben Stiller and Robert Downey, Jr. gear up for battle alongside troubled goofballs played by Hollywood’s finest in Tropic Thunder.

But indeed it’s a full-length movie, with a story of sorts (concocted by Stiller with Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen), which goes like this: The actors are together on the set of, yes, Tropic Thunder, a megabudget action epic about the Vietnam War, with Speedman reaching for respectability in the role of the now-grizzled veteran (Nick Nolte) on whose best-selling memoir the movie is based; Lazarus in cosmetically abetted blackface and loving it, to Chino’s increasing chagrin; and Portnoy junking up on heroin.

Their ego-clashing, budget-sucking antics are more than too much for their rookie English milquetoast director (Steve Coogan) to handle, and some painful pressure from his vulgarly volcanic studio chief (Tom Cruise) doesn’t exactly help. Solution? As Nolte’s war guru suggests to the floundering filmmaker, “You must put these boys in the shit.” Not a bad idea; deep into the real jungle they go, without any creature comforts—or any members of the crew to advise them that the heavily armed drug cartel whose path they cross is not actually in the script.

Well, each man gets his share of shtick, and its quality varies. The best of the business by far—for its funniness and surprise, its layers of awareness and charm—is Downey’s. Among these other cartoon characters, he’s a one-man graphic novel. Overall and maybe inevitably, Tropic Thunder is uneven, and ultimately it’s disposable, but what smug fun there is to be had from the notion that the whole overblown enterprise might be justified by this one formerly uninsurable actor’s performance alone.

So yes, Stiller deserves some of the congratulations he wants for his political incorrectness, for not being afraid to bite the Hollywood hand that feeds him, and for recognizing yet also gamely indulging the absurdity of it all. Matthew McConaughey is at a disadvantage in his perfunctory part as Tugg Speedman’s agent, whereas Danny McBride, the true comic maestro of Pineapple Express, shines again here as a pyromaniacal, just-happy-to-be-here on-set special effects dude. (“Tropic Thunder: Kinda like my Catcher in the Rye,” he says of the original book.) As for Cruise’s bald-white-dude victory dance at the end, well, there’s only one way to find out whether that’s worth waiting for.