Now You See Me

"Sometimes The Magic Works, Part 2"
or 
The Slightest of Hands

Bullwinkle: Hey, Rocky!  Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!
Rocky: But that trick NEVER works!

The tagline for Now You See Me, the latest film by Louis Letterier (who brought to you the modern version of Clash of the Titans, a not too bad film, actually, as empty-headed gladiator-myth movies go) is "The closer you look, the less you see," and, even though that's supposed to be saying something about the power of illusion, it couldn't be more appropriate for the movie it's supposed to be selling.  You'll get the most out of this movie if you're asleep during it.*  

Better yet, don't get rooked into it, and do the opposite of the film's title and don't see it at all.  Because there's movie-magic, where you feel the sense of wonder and amazement, and there's the kind that just makes you feel that you've been "taken."  Now You See Me makes me feel like a rube.

And that's the mastery of marketing.  Great cast, with a bunch of actors who've got taste and have done terrific things before...and James Franco's brother, Dave...so there must be something to this, right?  I mean, Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine,** Mark Ruffalo, Mélanie Laurent,*** Michael Kelly, and the Zombieland duo of Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson.  No slouches there.  

But the movie is such a drab circling-camera edit-fest (it feels like it was shot on a Roomba) that you know you're being misled somewhere, and you're being made to not think about what's going on on-screen, because, ultimately it makes no sense whatsoever.  The point of the movie is distraction, and there the movie succeeds quite well.  It's so busy and flashy, you stop thinking and take in the swirling, swooping actors and camera moves, and let them wash over you...and your brain stops. It's only at the end that you realize that the movie is a white-rabbit and it's disappeared, if it even existed in the first place.  Orson Welles said movie-making is smoke and mirrors, and there are plenty of mirrors here, but the result is pure smoke.

What's it about?  Four street magicians Daniel (Eisenberg) card-sharp, Merrit (Harrelson) a mentalist, Henley (Isla Fisher) escape artist, and Jack (Franco) pick-pocket, all accomplished, all a little larcenous, are recruited by a mysterious presence (who has surreptitiously observed all of them disguised in a hoodie—what, they couldn't see the face?) to form a guerrilla magic team called "The Four Horsemen."  They, after a jump of time, go from nothing to large coordinated shows, bankrolled by an insurance tycoon (Caine).  The first, in Vegas, involves the seeming transportation of a French citizen to his bank in France, that results in the sucking of millions of euros out of its vault, and spraying it throughout the large theater crowd...as if by magic.  This attracts the attention of the FBI in the form of agent Dylan Rhodes (Ruffalo) and Interpol's agent Alma Dray (Laurent), who pursue the clues and try to ascertain how they pulled off the heist.  Along the way, they interview Thaddeus Bradley (Freeman), a magic debunker, who has a vested interest in exposing the Horsemen for a series of buzz-kill videos and reality shows.  He shows the agents how it was done, then stops there, being very cagey about what the next scam will be.  As it turns out, it's in New Orleans, where Caine's insurance magnate tries to buy off Freeman to no avail.

At this point, you're wondering not about the "how," but the "why?"  What's everybody's motivation in this?  Freeman's stakes are relatively paltry—the group has just gotten started, who would care—so you begin to suspect he's behind it all.  Caine's interest in unimaginable, as he's putting out a large outlay of disposable cash for events that have no residual value, and leave him open to accessory and fraud charges.  And the agents' zeal is largely enigmatic (matching those of the Horsemen).  What's everybody in this for, other than to propel the movie?  It's a bit like The Sting (which had the guts to put the motivation up front) only skin-deep and with shallow surface-flash. Letterier and script-writers Ed Solomon, Boaz Yakin and Edward Ricourt provide no fore-thought, but just speed things up and turn on the pyrotechnics, so there's no time for questions and little room for answers, while the actors go through their paces with looks of ambivalence so as not to betray anything.

There's not that much to betray.  Once everything has been revealed (save for the fate of the Horsemen), there's no satisfaction, only a feeling of emptiness and pointlessness ("Really?  All that for that?") and then you begin to question everyone's behavior during the film, which makes no sense given the actions displayed throughout the movie.  One almost thinks that the film might have multiple endings, depending on which cineplex you go to, so tenuous is the resolution and back-story.  It doesn't bear close examination.

But then, we were warned.  "The closer you look, the less you see."

And it has nothing, absolutely nothing up its sleeve.

Now You See Me is a Cable-Watcher.


 * No Morgan Freeman jokes, please...

** Well, Michael Caine, he used to sign up for supermarket openings...

*** ...spent the whole movie wondering where I'd seen her before—Inglorious Basterds.

Marvel's The Avengers

"We've Got a Hulk..."
or
Playing Your "A" Game


This one is The Big Pay-Off.

Back in the day (around about Iron Man) when they started doing teasers at the end of Marvel movies for the idea of an "Avengers" event, one hoped that they could pull it off.  Captain America needed to work (and it did). Iron Man II integrated other characters successfully.  They even managed to make Thor somewhat interesting.  And even though two "Hulk" movies under-performed at the box-office, there was still potential there.  Given the scenario of the "Ultimate Avengers" storyline (a revamp in the Marvel line that started everything over from Origin Story Square One with a decidedly more adult, realistic attitude...and a Nick Fury that looked like Samuel L. Jackson) a case could be made for a good old fashioned Marvel Jam story of the "When Titans Clash!" school.

The problem is all those heroes. It could turn into a mighty cluster, if there isn't a compelling story that slots heroes into appropriate scenarios, a problem with some of the "X-Men" films.  And one also hopes that there's a compelling reason for these guys to be here, that there is some character function going on, even though they have plenty of screen-time in their own series to work on those.

Will The Avengers "assemble" into a well-functioning superhero romp, and make Joss Whedon (who excels at ensembles) an A-list director that fans have been hoping for?

"Yes" to the former and "Maybe" to the latter, although pulling off this one is not an easy feat—so many particular and persnickety stars, so many owned and exploitable characters that corporations (and opposing film studios) want to manage, and so many potential minefields that it would take a superhero (with levitating powers) to rise above and negotiate them.  But Marvel's The Avengers (what they're calling this one to avoid any confusion) manages to be fast-paced, quick-witted, and, although slightly derivative (mostly of Jack Kirby's "Fourth World" series, with hints of The Andromeda Strain in sub-text, and, let's face it, most mythology and comic book tropes), and is, as one character analogizes, "a bag full of cats," fulfills its basic tenet: to be consistently entertaining, with crises every few minutes, wonders to behold (some of the sets are simply amazing), interesting pair-ups in terms of fights (Marvel heroes are always fighting each other—they're very turf-oriented, which is bad because they're all in New York) and dialogue.  

And it does two essential things: keep each individual hero definable in tone and action, and make those fights "followable"—this isn't a hodge-podge of pictures of punches, muzzle-flares and explosions, there is breathing room between sequences and shots, so an audience is allowed to register action and result, something missing from a lot of action movies, where there is either bad direction or a style-disconnect between various "units" filming.  It feels "of a piece," despite the subject of the film being about extraordinary outcasts aligning uneasily.*

In a pithy line of dialogue between "Iron Man" Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr. riffing brilliantly) and villain Loki (Tom Hiddlestone, registering far more than he did in the Thor movie)—everybody gets their Loki scene, The Hulk's being the best—the entire movie is summed up in an adamantium-encased nut-shell: "Yeah, takes us a while to get any traction, I'll give you that one but, let's do a head count here. Your brother, the demi-god; a super soldier, a living legend who kind of lives up to the legend; a man with breath-taking anger management issues; a couple of master assassins, and you, big fella, you've managed to piss off every single one of them."  

Motivation enough to form a coalition of the willing.  And the disparate styles of the players is well-evidenced-six degrees of declaration: Chris Evans is all un-ironic directness (even though he is perfectly capable of matching Downey snark-for-snark);  Chris Hemsworth is all stentorian brio done with Shakespearean force (he's so much more effective here than in his own movie); Jeremy Renner is as taut as his crossbow wire, Scarlett Johnasson's blank-stared Black Widow is well-suited for her position as a lethal scam-artist, Samuel L. Jackson manages to make even original lines sound like oft-quoted cliches; and Downey, quick and mercurial, dances around the dialogue, adding his own steps.  Each actor has their own way of working with Whedon's words, and Downey's pace has everyone playing their "A" game.

But the best here is Mark Ruffalo, playing Dr. Bruce Banner and (the first time an actor is allowed to, via motion-capture) his altered super-ego, The Hulk.  Two movies and two different actors (Eric Bana and Edward Norton, no slouches) tried to do something with the limited premise and came up short.  However, here, with less screen-time, Ruffalo manages to make Banner as interesting as his comically destructive "Other Guy," his physicist not guarded or fearful or weak (as has been the norm), but ironically bitter, resignedly haunted, the most mysterious of Marvel's "Mystery-Men."  "You really have got a lid on it, haven't you?" says Stark at one point, referring to the Doctor's self-control and the monstrous result of any lack of it.  "What's your secret? Mellow jazz? Bongo drums? Huge bag of weed?"  Maybe The Hulk is such a one-smash pony that he's at his best as a supporting character, rather than the star of a movie series.  One could argue that about all the characters here with the exception of Downey's Iron Man, who is, due to the actor's efforts, a one-man circus.

But, here it's all in the group, nobody's around long enough to drag it down, and it's the interactions that count.  The plot is MacGuffin-oriented in the Marvel-style of "I-don't-know-what-it-is-but-it-sure-is-big:" the doohickey from Captain America and the whatsit from Thor are involved so that a race of advanced aliens can take over l'il old us.  Not sure of the motivation, but who cares? Marvel's The Avengers is big, bold, brassy and breezy, and has the feel and crazy zeal of those Japanese monster movies that combined a lot of characters and smashed them together.

I don't know what it is, but it sure is fun.**


Marvel's The Avengers is a Full Price Ticket.  (Go ahead, see it in 3-D)

All the potential Avengers, assembled by George (every little detail) Perez

* Whedon shows the eventual alliance solidifying in two nicely planned shots, one—used in all the commercials—orbiting the heroes as they "circle the wagons," and a meticulously planned CGI sequence in mid-battle that is the super-hero equivalent of "going around the horn."

** There are TWO codas this time: one after the initial credits (before they get into the detail stuff) and another one that was filmed right after the Hollywood premiere that's odd...but fun.

The Brothers Bloom

"The Brothers Bloom" (Rian Johnson, 2008) One of those ones that "got away" when I first started LNTAM; I'd wanted to see this in the theaters and it disappeared, like your betting money, so quickly there wasn't a chance.

Johnson had been the enfant terrible behind the enfant terrible noir-film "Brick," (which was a nicely designed but ultimately precious/pretentious conceit—a detective movie set in high school), and there was enough there to anticipate what he was going to do next. The last thing you'd expect would be this reality-twisting con-game movie at equal times ebullient and dark, densely written and skippily edited that tips its hat to the Tarantino era with all its style, but none of its sloppy excesses.

And the other thing: it's a double-love story...about people who can't, don't or won't tell the truth and being able to express that love and make it stick, or accept that love and believe it.

No, no. Don't get worried. It's also a lot of fun, especially in its puppyish wise-acre first hour that moves at such an unsustainable pace of quirk that the second-half doesn't have a chance to match it. That half-way down-shift initially feels like a let-down (and some unfortunate back-story editing robs the movie of some Peckinpavian resonance), but Johnson has to reveal the con at some point and the visceral let-down is inevitable. The motto of the movie (and The Brothers Bloom) is "the perfect con is when everyone gets exactly what they want." Johnson manages to pull that off...and quite brilliantly.

He's got great players to do it with. Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo play the brothers (Brody's Bloom, and Ruffalo's his older brother Stephen), two orphan con-men locked in the game that informs and colors their lives. Their partner in crime is the mostly mute Bang Bang (the clever Rinko Kikuchi), and there's a network of con-men they tap into (but never really trust) including The Curator (Robbie Coltrane) and Diamond Dog (Maximilian Schell)—a lot of Oscars in this cast—but the focus of the last of a series of Last Big Cons is Penelope Stamp (Rachel Weisz) an eccentric millionaire, isolated in her youth by a misdiagnosed allergy (to everything), and with whom Bloom becomes her first true friend. Weisz's peculiar choices in performance nicely buoy Brody's sad-sack (which he has perfected) and both Ruffalo and Kikuchi play off each other and the other actors with a kind of thrilling certainty of the world and their place in it (and ability to change it). Johnson's multi-plane action in frames (especially in the first half) approach the deft timing of a Warner Brothers cartoon.

It's different, breaks the mold, keeps you guessing and stays with you until you make that last jump—that all movies are a con. And the best ones are the ones where people get exactly what they want. Yes.

Shutter Island

"What's yer Next Move, Boss?"
or
"Tag! You're It!"

It is 1954, and out of the fog comes a ferry boat carrying two U.S. Marshalls, heading for "Shutter Island", where squats, in various stages of dis-repair, Ashecliffe, an asylum for the criminally insane. In the "head," sea-sick,* is Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), "the legend" as his partner from Seattle Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo, who has a rather thick Massachusetts accent for it) calls him. The two are investigating the disappearance of an inmate from Ward B, the women's section, and right from the get-go, the two are at a disadvantage.

Upon crossing the electrified fence, their weapons are confiscated, security being what it is. "What?" Teddy smirks at the guard "You act like insanity is catching." The guard only smirks back. That should have been his first clue.

The doctors (Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow) are helpful to a point, but then they become somewhat diffident and challenging, even obstructing, protective of their "advanced" techniques—"a moral fusion between law and order and clinical care." The missing woman, Rachel Solendo (Emily Mortimer), drowned her kids after her husband was killed during the Normandy invasion and has never acknowledged the act. But she somehow managed to escape from a cell, locked from the outside, and with a guard on duty. Investigating, Daniels finds a cryptic note "The Law of 4. Who is 67?"

But that's all surface. Daniels volunteered for this case because he wanted to get to Shutter Island for some personal business. He's still haunted by the death of his wife, Dolores (Michelle Williams), who died in a fire that was set by an insane fire-bug named Andrew Laeddis (Elias Koteas**), presently incarcerated in Ashecliffe's Ward C—for the most dangerous criminals. Daniels has done some investigating of the facility, and what he's turned up indicates that radical techniques, from experimental drugs to lobotomies, are being practiced, and as funds are being channelled there from the House Un-American Activities Committee, he thinks the government is working on a secret brainwashing program to infiltrate radicals as double agents. Teddy wants to blow the lid off the place.

That is, if Nature doesn't get the chance first. A hurricane is barrelling down on Shutter Island ("It's like f...ing Kansas out there!"), threatening to cut off power to the electrical systems keeping the prisoners locked up and backed off. If the power goes, there's no back-up generator to kick in.

All of this concerns his partner, Marshall Chuck Aule; Teddy's been doing all this investigating of Ashecliffe, the doctors are resisting co-operating, they have no guns, the facility controls the ferry that's their only way out, and there's a storm coming. They're stuck on an island with a bunch of crazy convicts and an administrative staff who doesn't like them much, and wouldn't mind if they just...oh, had an accident or something. And Teddy's starting to get sick—plagued by migraines that Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) diagnoses only too quickly with some handy aspirin nearby. Then, there's the German Doctor Naehring (Max von Sydow) who's the co-director of Ashcliffe and chief diagnostician. Teddy was one of the soldiers who liberated Dachau, so he's immediately suspicious of him. "Do you believe in God, Marshall?" Naehring challenges him. "Ever seen a death-camp, doctor?" Teddy sneers back.

There's a lot of story-point to juggle,*** but director Martin Scorsese focuses on the atmospherics, which is laid down with a heavy hand in the same manner as he directed "Cape Fear." When it comes to working on genre features, Scorsese is never subtle, and the film is filled with dark spaces (with things that go KA-BOOM in the night), blinding lightning strikes, dripping facades and the most suggestive of dream-sequences. Before too much has happened, you begin to question everything you see, and at that point the director throws the continuity girl off the cliff and does whatever he wants, reality having little to do with the movie. The secret to this kind of film-making is keeping audiences guessing and Scorsese stretches it out as far as he can (to the point where some audience members will still be questioning it after they leave the theater).

Which is unfortunate. Because the most important thing about this movie (and story) is another of author Dennis Lehane's moral quagmires. That is what one should be discussing, as opposed to "What just happened?"

So, call this another in a series of "minor Scorsese films" (but not so minor that it might win a mercy "Best Picture" Oscar), and we hope (again) that we'll see another film from him with more substance than mere style. One wonders how much Scorsese is sacrificing by hitching his film-making wagon to star Leonardo DiCaprio. DiCaprio is a bankable star so studios are only too happy to finance a Scorsese film starring him and this allows Scorsese to keep working in a youth-oriented market in the most profit-based center of film-making, Hollywood. But DiCaprio the baby-faced star (no matter how much he scowls) is the water to Scorsese's boiling oil. There is a sense, and it may only be mine, that DiCaprio is shoe-horned into Scorsese projects for which he is not suited, and perhaps the two should have a trial separation to see what kind of film the mature film-maker will produce without his too-young star. In the first part of his career, Scorsese's non-Robert DeNiro films were "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," and "After Hours," two distinctive films that, even without the director's frequent collaborator, said something about our lives and times prismed through Scorsese's kinetic view-finder. After his tampered-with version of "Gangs of New York," he has produced "The Aviator," "The Departed," and this film, all with DiCaprio, and they are films more like "New York, New York," that accentuate style over substance. Great cinematic rides they may be, but they're flashes in a film-can, that leave you still hungry to see a great movie.

"Shutter Island" is a Matinee.

Post-script: I've changed my rating of "Shutter Island" to a matinee and I'm not so sure it is a minor Scorsese film, as it's stayed with me for more than a week, and the images and intricacies keep popping into my brain to slap me upside the head. "Missed it!" I think the "Decaprio" element still brings the movie down a bit, but a second viewing of "Shutter Island" shows intricacies that in the first viewing one doesn't know they don't know. That's subtle film-making that doesn't wave red flags at the audience, and the film slots into Scorsese's body of work quite smoothly. Trouble is, I can't go into details about it, or I might spoil the movie for anybody else.

Well, we'll just leave that for a piece down the road.

* Teddy is another Mass. cop who has the shakes about water. In "Jaws," Chief Brody's wife tries to be helpful: "There's a technical name for it..." "Drowning" is his quick reply.

** No, it's not Robert DeNiro, although it looks like him in the trailer. It's Elias Koteas...with a really big scar.

*** The script is by "Avatar" adapter Laeta Kalogridis, who Lehane thought did a masterful job with a difficult assignment. It is.

You Can Count On Me - Take Two

"You Can Count On Me" (Kenneth Lonergan, 2000) Samantha Prescott does everything right. She's a responsible single mom, with a well-regimented life, a steady job as a loan officer at a bank in upstate New York.* Life is good.

Her younger brother, Terry, though, wanders around, has no job but does have a girl "in trouble," and needs money. So it's time for a visit to Sammy to get away from the disaster of his life, spend some time with family. Maybe borrow some money.

Sammy is the responsible one. Terry is responsible, too, but it's usually for trouble. How can two disparate people come from the same family? Easy! And Terry's visit becomes a disruptive influence in the calm of Sammy's life. Doesn't it?

That's the central issue in this warm, bitter little dramedy that has at its core two extraordinarily strong performances from the astonishing Laura Linney and the chameleon-like Mark Rufalo. Linney doesn't change her look much from movie to movie; for her, it's all in the eyes, and in this one, she's got her "high-beams" on, scoping the world for danger, but rarely seeing it. Imagining it, yes, but never seeing it. Rufalo is all shaggy schlumpf in attitude and posture--a human question mark. He answers a few questions in the mind of Sammy's son Rudy (the latest spookily-good Culkin, Rory)--things Mom would never reveal to keep things tidy. Meanwhile she has a prickly problem with her new boss (Mathew Broderick, in full smarm mode--what he does best).

It's a seemingly simple film about the complications of family, which as everyone and his brother knows, implies a lot of blood under the bridge, because it's always thicker than water.




* Alright, I see you smirking! At the time this was written, it wasn't nearly so ironic.

You Can Count on Me

You Can Count on Me, (Lonergan, 2000) - to screw up, to get on your case but also to be there for you.

A tale of personal accountability and how life isn't always fair but that there are some things you can rely on. Like the younger brother who always screws up, and the older sister who is always on his case, but also that people can and do sometimes act out of character or even change, and that some bonds are too strong to be broken.

It is a curious morality tale in which even Ron (played by the director, Kenneth Lonergan), the local priest admits that it doesn't matter too much about what you call your beliefs as long as you just have something to believe in:

Sammy: I don't know what the church's official position is on fornication and adultery these days, and I felt really hypocritical not saying anything to you about it before, but what is the official position these days?
Ron: Well... it's a sin.
Sammy: Good, I think it should be!
Ron: But we try not to focus on that aspect right off the bat.
Sammy: Why not? I think you should.
Ron: Well...
Sammy: Maybe it was better when they screamed at you from the box for having sex with your married boss, they told you what a terrible thing it was, they were really mean to you. Maybe it would be better if you just told me that I'm endangering my immortal soul and that if I don't stop, I'm gonna burn in hell. Don't you ever think that?
Ron: No, not really.

Laura Linney (as Sammy) and Mark Ruffalo (as her brother, Terry) carry the movie. Matthew Broderick (as Sammy's boss, Brian) does enough to show you why no one would want to work for him if not exactly why Sammy would want to meet him in a motel but maybe that's why Terry is right about how boring life is in Stockville. Definitely one to put on your list: you can count on it.