..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Pineapple Express
plus a review of Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Hell Ride, and a better Brideshead
Plus Quick Hits On This Week's DVDs

..Counterfeiters Theatrical Review ..MCN Critics Roundup ..MCN Review Vault

Pineapple Express Three and a half stars
U.S.; David Gordon Green (Sony)

Just when I was beginning to get a little sick and tired of the Judd Apatow movie gang -- it started happening to me about halfway though Step Brothers when it became obvious that the doofusses played by Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly were going to be winners by the end of the show -- along comes Pineapple Express. Wow!
 
I haven’t laughed this hard at a comedy since Sideways -- a better, less messy movie which has`a similar strategy of total immersion of two intoxicated buddies in a nightmare of dangerous consequences, buried homosexuality and unraveling good times. To enjoy Sideways, you‘ve got to admit your own foibles as you recognize them in the characters and to keep liking (and forgiving) Giamatti and Church‘s wine odyssey chums Miles and Jack anyway, even as they keep screwing up and getting into worse Dutch.

That’s what has to happen in Pineapple Express too -- though it might be harder for some critics, even though Pineapple Express was directed by sometime critical pet, the rangily poetic regionalist David Gordon Green (George Washington). It’s actually my favorite of all Green’s mostly fine movies. But it’s not the sort of movie we associate with him. It’s a totally guilty pleasure, a movie that’s almost hard to admit you like: a balls-out action comedy where Green and co-writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, just don’t seem to give a damn how far over the edge they go. But that’s good. That’s what a lot of the best comedians do: head for the laugh that kills.

After all, Giamatti and Church’s Miles and Jack simply got into some rowdy drunken scrapes, and lied and cheated and philandered and robbed one of their mothers. But their Pineapple Express counterparts Seth Rogen and James Franco -- with Rogen playing an amiable, swizzled, but often anxious pothead process server named Dale Denton and Franco incarnating Dale’s constantly schnockered but sweet-tempered pot dealer, Saul Silver -- actually get involved through Saul’s relationship with super-bad, super-mean drug czar Ted Jones (Gary Cole) in drug wars, car chases, gun-battles, mutilations, murders, slaughter and driving a stolen car through L. A. with your foot through the windshield -- the kind of insensate over-indulged violence that usually pops up in a Bad Boys movie. This isn’t Bad Boys, but its not realistic. Not even as realistic as Superbad. It’s a genre curve-ball, front-loaded with real emotions, more like Midnight Run on Acapulco Gold.

Rogen loses part of an ear at one point (which he clumsily tries to reattach) and poor Danny McBride, a Green regular playing a sleazy but good-hearted dealer named Red, gets himself almost dismantled by a pair of idiotic hit men (Kevin Corrigan and Craig Robinson). Finally, the Uzi kung fu gang shows up, looking for John Woo. Earlier, in the midst of all this high-spirited carnage, the blood-smeared and dirty Dale manages to show up for a get-acquainted dinner with the appalled parents of his high school girl friend Angie (Amber Heard ). And did I mention that these guys also try to get out of their jam by peddling dope to school kids?

I told you this was a hard movie to stand up for. It’s a bit like appearing as a character witness in court for your cousin, the cross-dressing, shoplifting pyromaniac. But hell, he’s really a good guy, your honor. And it’s really a good movie.

So why would you want to watch all this, instead of say purifying your cultural bloodstream at Brideshead Revisited? For one thing, Rogen and Franco here are a no-kidding smoking comedy team. The only stoned amalgamations you can compare them to, are Cheech and Chong and Jeff Bridges’ Dude and his buddies in the Coens’ The Big Lebowski.

In comedy teams, there’s usually a smoothie and a hysteric. Here, Rogen and Franco give those classis roles a different spin. Rogen’s Dale is a suit-and-tie hysteric and Franco’s Saul is a stoned smoothie. Cowriter Rogen plays his anxious doper shtick to the hilt and his motor mouth dialogue (for himself and the others) deserves at least, a His Girl Friday citation. As he slaps people with subpoenas, Dale keeps assuming different roles, but his masks of semi-propriety are always slipping a bit and the jam he gets into with Saul strips him naked. (Psychologically naked; we don’t have to endure another Apatow penis gag.)

All the actors are god in Pineapple Express, even the somewhat ignored women like Rosie Perez’s crooked cop. But the dude who really keeps the show cooking is Franco as Saul. Looking and sounding a bit like Brad Pitt in True Romance (he has that same sneaky doper smile), Franco is so far into the part and he ignites so many moments into comic gems, you keep wondering if there’s real ganja on the set.

Saul is as perfect a comic portrayal of a pothead dealer as Church‘s Jack was of a sexaholic in Sideways. In fact -- Heath Ledger and Dark Knight aside -- the movie performance that’s impressed me most in the last month or so is Franco‘s here. An Oscar for a sympathetic marijuana dealer? Won’t Fox TV go nuts? But just watch Franco closely all the way through. He’s got the part nailed.

Can you recommend Pineapple Express to everybody. Probably not. You can’t recommend Sideways to everybody either, or W. C. Fields or Preston Sturges, or even Chaplin and Keaton. But this movie made me laugh, and personally I’ve never touched the stuff. As far as I remember.



The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 Two and a half stars
U.S.; Sanaa Hamri (Warner Bros)

Pineapple Express is a very good male-bonding comedy. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 -- a sequel to the 2005 hit based on Ann Brashares’ teen novel -- is a pretty good female-bonding comedy-drama.

I hope it doesn’t look as if my gender is skewing my tastes here. I like female-bonding movies -- from Stage Door, and Old Acquaintance to Thelma and Louise and Fried Green Tomatoes to the current salty Sex in the City trend of increased sexual candor and female empowerment.

I just think half of “Sisterhood 2” works fine and the other half stumbles and gets schmaltzy. As in the first movie, we focus here on the four separate (and sometimes intertwined) stories of four young women: school-age buddies who share the magical reassurance of a pair of decorated jeans that passes from hand to hand and mysteriously fits all of them. This quartet includes angry young filmmaker Tibby (Amber Tamblyn), dedicated theater lover Carmen (America Ferrera), family-troubled archeology student Bridget (Blake Lively) and broken-hearted artist Lena (Alexis Bledel). All of them are well-cast and all but Bridget have man problems, ranging from possible pregnancy to broken vows.

Don’t worry. Everything works out fine -- for the sisterhood, if not necessarily their pants.

The two sequences that work well are the ones with Tibby (an affecting look at a relationship crisis) and with Carmen (a neat little post-All About Eve tale of backstage jealousy and triumph anchored by another pungent, right-on performance by Ferrera.) Less successful are the stories with Bridget and Lena -- though Bridget’s has the advantage of an appearance by the luminously stage-stealing Blythe Danner (who can spark up any movie) and Lena‘s ends with Greek scenery that knocks your eyes out.

Even if my gender is blinding me here, I've gotta say that half a good movie is better than none. But I still prefer a Pineapple Express high with the guys this week, mayhem and all.



Hell Ride One and a half stars
U.S.; Larry Bishop (Third Rail Releasing)

Remember the good old days of The Savage Seven, Hell’s Angels on Wheels and Chrome and Hot Leather? Remember the pungent ‘60s-‘70s movie era of cool dudes on Harley Davidsons, sultry dolls in C-cup bras and wild rides set to Wild Angels-style fuzz-tone riffs? In Hell Ride -- thanks to executive producer Quentin Tarantino -- writer-director-star and one time cycle-movie regular Larry Bishop wants to bring it all back. Occasionally he does.

It may seem peculiar to suggest that the greatest appeal of a new flick featuring copious amounts of sadistic violence, happily gratuitous sex, frequent female nudity, grotesque bloodshed and nonstop foul language is its vein of sweet nostalgia, but that’s almost the case here -- in this Sergio Leone and Roger Corman-conscious saga of a feud between longtime rival biker gangs 666 (the bad, devilish guys) and The Victors (the sort of good guys).

The deliberately clichéd plot has a fearsome threesome from The Victors -- Pistolero (Bishop), The Gent (Michael Madsen), and Comanche (Eric Balfour) -- battle brutal 666er Billy Wings (Vinnie Jones) and his Wild-ish Bunch through a series of bashes and bloodlettings that rage all over the scorching California land and roadscapes. You’ve seen most of it before, and that’s the idea.

Bishop -- the son of the late comedian and Sinatra Clan-member Joey Bishop -- actually appeared in Savage Seven and Hot Leather, as well as Wild in the Streets and other mini-budget blasts, and he remembers the swaggering acting mode and flashy low rent cinematographic style and content of those old drive in movie specials, right down to the last swish pan and rack-focus. He also recalls and digs the majestically macho grand opera vendetta techniques of the ‘60s Sergio Leone westerns -- Tarantino favorites that are also copied here.

And Bishop has been able to talk some hard-bitten, stylish veterans of that era -- notably Easy Rider’s mean-eyed maestro Dennis Hopper (as Eddie “Scratch” Zero of The Victors) and Boxcar Bertha’s stoic David Carradine (as the Deuce of the 666ers) , as well as Tarantino mainstay Madsen (the murderous Mr. Blonde of Reservoir Dogs) --into doing their stuff here. Their performances are the highlights of the movie -- which could use more of all of them.

No one can look crazier than Hopper, few can take a punch like Carradine and nobody can smirk quite like Madsen, here decked out in an unlikely Dean Martin hog-riding outfit of full tuxedo and gun.

Unfortunately, Bishop has been a little too punctilious about copying the bad-movie style -- actually making a bad movie -- and he’s used his filmmaker‘s prerogative here a bit too liberally -- putting himself in too many sex and foreplay scenes with beautiful and naked fellow cast members like Cassandra Hepburn (as Lana) and Leonor Varela (as Nada.) In any case, Pistolero needs to be established here more as a cool, Eastwood-style warrior than an amazing stud and frequent grinner, in order to make the movie‘s showdowns work right.

Hell Ride is also a little fuzzy and arty in its sound and exposition. Casual viewers unaware of biker movie conventions may be a little lost. One might also wonder why Tarantino and his bunch are spending so much time trying to recapture the ambience of those old bad-good cheapo movies -- whose style was mostly a function of very low budgets. It’s a dubious strategy, especially for the guy that brought us Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, two great movies with classier models. But, if your dad belonged to the Rat Pack, and you’ve got Dennis Hopper on a hog and Michael Madsen in a tux, it can cover up a multitude of sins.

 

Brideshead Revisited Two and a half stars
U.K.; Julian Jarrold (Miramax)

See DVD review of the 1981 adaptation below.

 

MW on DVD
Picks of the Week

NEW RELEASES

The Counterfeiters Three and a half stars
Austria; Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2007 (Sony Pictures Classics)

Movies about World War 2 and the Holocaust are often contenders for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar -- and that’s partly because of the age and interests of the likely nominators. Stefan Ruzowitzky’s “The Counterfeiters,” this year’s Oscar winner from Austria, is typical. It’s a sometimes over- obvious but absorbing story, based on fact, about a group of Jewish WW2 death camp inmates who are forced to help finance the Nazi war, by forging first British and then American currency. Heading up the operation: a one-time master counterfeiter/prisoner named Salomon Sorowitsch -- played by Karl Markovics, who looks a bit here like Ingmar Bergman‘s dissipated black sheep cousin.
    
Sorowitsch is a complex character and so is his genial Nazi recruiter/boss. And Ruzowitzky‘s style, full of hand-held, mobile, active camerawork, sweeps you into the story, which has moments both poignant and powerful. There were better foreign language films last year, including “Belle Toujours” and “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days,” but this one is definitely worth your time. It’s no counterfeit. (In German and French, with English subtitles.) Extras: Commentary by Ruzowitzky, deleted scenes, historical artifacts, “making of” featurette, interviews with Ruzowitzky, Marcovics and real-life counterfeiter Adolf Burger.

The full review from the theatrical release here.

CLASSIC RELEASES

Terms of Endearment (“I Love the 80s” edition) Four stars
U.S.; James L. Brooks, 1983 (Paramount)

This is part (the best) of a Paramount promotion hailing an American movie decade -- the ‘80s -- which I personally consider one of the worst ever. But this re-release of James L. Brooks’ supreme tearjerker, based on the Larry McMurtry novel about a Texas mother and daughter (the peerless Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger), is one exception that helps prove the rule.

It’s a wonderful movie and not at all typical of the Hollywood ’80s, an often mindless decade which tended to drown us in special effects, bloody buddy-buddy action, unfunny teenage sex comedy and farces about wild and goofy, sex-crazed guys on the loose. Instead Terms of Endearment, based on a fine, earthy McMurtry novel, with a superb cast (including Jeff Daniels, John Lithgow and Danny De Vito) and an excellent mounting by writer-director Brooks, gave us a funny and moving yet realistic story about a recognizably human family, filled with admirable social detail, an honest confrontation of pain and anguish, and an absolutely terrific mature adults’ love story (between sexy grandma Shirley and raffish astronaut Jack Nicholson).

This movie, on first viewing, made me cry. It has that effect on even more world-weary and cynical types than me -- including the Motion Picture Academy, which gave it five Oscars: two for Brooks as writer and director, one apiece for actress Shirley and supporting actor Jack and one for best picture of 1983.

BOX SETS

Brideshead Revisited Four stars
U.K.; Charles Sturridge, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, 1981 (Acorn Media)

Justly renowned as one of the finest of all TV literary miniseries, this 1981 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh‘s superb 1945 novel -- a semi-autobiographical account of his years at Oxford and afterward, climaxing in a bleak World War 2 coda -- puts to shame the current, overrated Brideshead re-revisitation feature by Julian Jarrold, starring Emma Thompson as Lady Marchmain, Ben Whishaw as her doomed son Sebastian and Mathew Goode as Waugh surrogate Charles Ryder,

Beautifully scripted by John Mortimer (creator of “Rumpole of the Bailey“) and very richly and finely directed by Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay Hogg, the BBC Brideshead is one of the most faithful, lavish and wondrously literary of all the best British TV classic novel adaptations. In its sumptuous 11 episodes and 659 minutes, we follow Charles (Jeremy Irons, in his deservedly star-making performance) and his love affair with a family and a house: the Marchmains and Flytes of Brideshead. As recounted with bittersweet irony by Charles, the romance begins with his not-so-latently homosexual friendship with the exquisite, teddy-bear-lugging, sweet eccentric Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews, who with his blonde, sodden, bleary-eyed grace, seems a perfect physical match for the part) and ends, heartbreakingly, with his near-marriage to Sebastian’s saucy, sinful but finally reverent sister, Julia (Diana Quick, who has a bit of Jackie Bisset in her) .

Along the way, the adorable but fragile Sebastian disintegrates into full-blown alcoholism and Charles’ rationalism collides disastrously with the fervent, complicated Catholicism of the Brideshead household, especially that of rigid, regal Lady Marchmain (Claire Bloom) whose pleasure-loving husband (Laurence Olivier) has decamped like many another British aristocratic voluptuary to Venice.

Irons seems a perfect Charles. The actor’s meticulously phrased, dreamy and sonorous narration of Waugh’s words and descriptions provides the ideal entry into the world that so entrances Charles -- the lush grounds, and charmingly eccentric family life of Brideshead, in a word that’s vanishing even as he discovers it in his early Oxford days of 1922, the mansion and family that he allows to seduce him and that finally breaks -- so relentlessly and inevitably -- his heart.

If you like or love British literary film adaptations, this is one to own. I cannot imagine a better film version of Waugh’s magnum opus than this one. Ironically it’s so good, it makes the new movie version seem better too, because, if you’ve seen it first, you can fill in all the blanks and correct the sometimes unwise changes made by Jarrold and company in their new film. The miniseries’ remarkable cast also includes John Gielgud, Stephane Audran and Jane Asher. Sturridge later went on to make a very good 1988 film of Waugh‘s A Handful of Dust, with James Wilby, Kristin Scott Thomas, Judi Dench and Alec Guinness. But this was his hour -- his 11 hours -- in the sun, along with much of the rest of Brideshead's company as well.

Extras: Documentary “Revisiting Brideshead“; interviews with Irons, Sturridge, Andrews, Quick and others; commentaries by Irons, Quick, Andrews and others; outtakes, filmographies, production notes, photo gallery.


Larisa Shepitko Four stars
Russia (U.S.S.R.); Larisa Shepitko, 1966-77 (Criterion Collection/Eclipse Series 11)

One of the great woman filmmakers of all time, is the now sadly neglected Russian writer-director Larisa Shepitko -- the student of the classic Russian master Alexander Dovzhenko, married to the equally gifted Elem Klimov (Come and See), colleague and peer of Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovksy, killed in a car crash in her prime at the age of 40, and memorialized here with a box set containing her superb early work, Wings (1966) and her unquestioned masterpiece, 1977’s The Ascent.

Wings is the stirring story of a frustrated Russian WW2 veteran Nadezhda (played by the great actress Maya Bulgakova), a onetime fighter pilot, who now leads a dull and uninspiring life as a school principal-- and whose glorious, exciting past, scaling the heights and soaring heavenward in her bomber, is tellingly contrasted with her more ordinary, and very earthbound, present.

The magnificent The Ascent, one of the great anti-war films, again focuses on WW2, following two Byelorussian peasant soldiers through dangerous snow-covered rural territory, villages and farmlands as they try to find their way back to their company. Boris Plotnikov and Vladimir Gostyukhin play the soldiers, and the story, based on Vasili Bykov’s novel “Sotnikov,“ is fashioned by Shepitko into one of the true post-war era Soviet classics. The evocative black and white cinematography by Vladimir Chukhnov beautifully communicates the wintry cold and the angst-ridden journey and Shepitko’s brilliant direction builds almost unbearable tension on the way to the movie‘s stunning, emotional, transcendent climax.

My only complaint about this excellent, long-needed package from Criterion/Eclipse is that it isn’t longer. I wish it also included Shepitko’s 1963 Heat, shot on the Kazakh steppes, her 1973 medical drama You and I, her short films and Farewell, her deeply moving final project, an ecological drama reminiscent of Elia Kazan’s Wild River, directed by her husband, Klimov, after she died on the way to the location. Cinephiles, trust me. You may not have heard of Larisa Shepitko, but you must own or see this set.

Includes: Wings (Shepitko, 1966) (Four stars); The Ascent (Shepitko, 1977) (Four stars) In Russian, with English subtitles. No extras.

- Michael Wilmington
August 8, 2008

July 17: The Dark Knight, Space Chimps, Mamma Mia!, Encounters At The End Of The World
July 10: Hellboy II: The Goilden Army ,Journey to the Center of the Earth, Kit Kittredge, Wanted, The Wackness, The Heartbeat Indicator, Monsieur Verdoux
July 3: Hancock, The Mother of Tears
June 26: Wall-E
June 19: Get Smart, The Love Guru, The Duchess of Langeais, Glass: A Portrait of Phillip in Twelve Parts, Up The Yangtze, The Passion of The Mao
June 12 : The Incredible Hulk,War Inc., Shotgun Stories, It Always Rains on Sundays
June 5 : Kung Fu Panda, You Don't Mess With The Zohan, Mongol, 'Tis Autumn, At The Death House Door
May 29: Sex & The City, The Strangers, Irina Palm, The Fall
May 22: Indiana Jones 4, Postal, Contempt
May 15: Prince Caspian, How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Vacation, DVD: Indiana Jones Collection
May 8: Speed Racer , Redbelt, What Happens In Vegas
May 1: Iron Man, Son Of Rambow, Flight of The Red Balloon
April 24: Tuya's Marriage, Chapter 27
April 17: My Blueberry Nights
April 10: Shine A Light, Plus Young @ Heart, Smart People, and The Forbidden Kingdom

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