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

..Wilmington on DVD ..MCN Critics Roundup ..MCN Review Page

State of Play ,
Anvil! The Story of Anvil, 17 Again, American Violet, Is Anybody There? and The Song of Sparrows
_________________________________

State of Play (Three Stars)
U. S.; Kevin Macdonald (2009)
    
There are several things wrong with State of Play, director Kevin Macdonald’s brainy thriller, adapted from the celebrated Paul Abbott BBC mini-series on journalism and politics. But speaking as an old newspaperman, I couldn’t bring myself to get much bothered them. (What a funny thing to say about yourself, he thinks, bent over the laptop in his living room and yearning a little for the days when he rattled stories off in not-too-noisy newspaper offices, which never quite reminded him enough of the reporters’ room in the ‘20s Chicago Criminal Courts Building in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur‘s The Front Page -- the play that made him fall in love, at 12, with newspapers and news people. It was a huge unkillable crush confirmed several months later by his first viewing of a snazzy newspaper movie called Citizen Kane.)
    
So, what about State of Play? This is a thriller, with (for me) a phony, unsatisfying ending -- surprising considering its illustrious source -- one that sent me out of the theater with a sour aftertaste. But, as a gritty-scrappy, lovingly detailed mash note to our dying profession and vanishing world --a milieu partly killed by the very internet website universe around us now -- and as a showcase for some brilliant and/or attractive actors (including Russell Crowe, Helen Mirren, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Jeff Daniels and Jason Bateman, who comes close to stealing the whole movie from that formidable lineup) -- it succeeds.
    
Crowe plays Cal McAffrey, a shaggy, irreverent star reporter of the old school, or what we “Front Page” lovers like to think was the old school: a wise-ass, sloppy-dressed, booze-quaffing consummate pro, employed by the Washington Post, ah make that Washington Globe. Affleck is Stephen Collins, a fashion plate U. S. Congressman who looks like a movie star and whose intern has just been killed -- an intern with whom he was having an affair (as in the real-life Gary Condit-Chandra Levy case), ignoring the dangers to his promising career and lovely wife (Robin Wright Penn).
    
Rachel McAdams -- who makes my heart sing a little whenever I spot her in a cast list -- is Della Frye, a smarty-pants star blogger, who gets joined at the hip to Cal as an investigative team (a bit, at first, like the bickering Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll handcuffed together in The 39 Steps. Jeff Daniels is a conservative, scandal-conscious snake of a U. S. Senator, monitoring the mess. And Helen Mirren is the hardnosed editor Cameron, played by Bill Nighy in the TV show -- publishers breathing down her neck -- who wants to get the news out, and more important, wants to sell it to enough people to save the Globe.
    
The movie, directed by Macdonald, who made the Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September, shot the thrilling mountain climbing recreation/doc Touching the Void and handled Forrest Whitaker’s Oscar-glomming Idi Amin star turn in The Last King of Scotland, is very well directed but not especially well-written, despite a seemingly ace screenplay screenwriting team that includes Matthew Michael Carnahan, Tony Gilroy and Billy Ray -- and despite a source teleplay, written by Abbott, that’s considered a knockout. (I kept thinking “Why didn’t that they just give Abbott a tour of the big American newspapers, and let him write it? Or, better yet, keep it in London?” But then, somebody was probably thinking of that other Brit miniseries “Traffik” aka “Traffic.“ And since I haven’t seen Abbott’s show yet, I can’t back up my hunch.)
    
Perhaps the biggest problem with the movie lies in something I can’t discuss too much without giving things away, but that lies at the heart of the matter: the morally troublesome friendship between Cal and Collins. In England, they relish political sex scandals. (Gotcha!) In America, where one of our most beloved presidents, Jack Kennedy, was something of a chaser, political sex doesn’t play the same way, though a scandal is just as ruinous. The movie “State of Play“ has a tendency toward preachments, and it also seems bent (at least in this American edition) on avoiding certain lefty clichés while stumbling into others. Clichés can work well in thrillers, especially if they’re twisted in just the right way. (“I adore clichés,” Roman Polanski once said. “All the great artists use them.”) Here though, they aren’t twisted enough.
    
I liked it anyway, despite my sense that a movie about a paper held up by an editor for hours for a story the reporter not only hasn’t written, but hasn’t even finished investigating, deserves scads of demerits. So does a movie that gives a blogger in her 20s that big an office, while the star reporter toils away at a paper-strewn mess of a desk that resembles some of my old haunts. (Like Cal’s, I operated on the paper tower filing system.)
    
The movie also teases us, but doesn’t offer much romance. Cal has had an affair with Anne, but that was in the past, and he pretty much keeps hands off Della -- something I found unbelievable, given the actors. (Sexual-political correctness be damned. Cal should probably have made a big sloppy play for her, she should have swatted him, and they should have decided to forget about it. It would have violated office harassment codes, but it would have been a great scene, and it would have given them the opportunity for a great exchange of glances at the end. (Ah, what might have been!)
    
Crowe and McAdams are such good, sexy actors, it seems a waste to make them play too much by the rules. In any case, Crowe does a good job of giving us some of the moral and psychological ambiguities of a crack reporter messy in his private habits, but punctilious in his profession. His very diet -- cheese and chili burgers (and it looks like Crowe had a few himself as research), is expressive, as are his greasy mane and little boy eyes. Della and Cameron are shallowly written, but McAdams and Mirren fill them out. Ben Affleck is slick and opaque, which works well enough; I kept wondering though what the movie would have been like with a shaggier-than-usual Matt Damon as Cal. The guy who gives much more than the script probably gave him, maybe through improvs, is Bateman, as Dominic Foy, a fantastically sleazy P. R. hustler.
    
Anyway, as a thriller, State of Play may be overheated and somewhat unsatisfying, especially compared to its illustrious source. But how can you knock a movie that has a newspaper office set like this one has? Those cubicles! That glass observatory office for Cameron! Production designer Mark Friedberg deserves an Alexander Trauner citation for this. (Trauner was the man who designed Jack Lemmon‘s Manhattan workplace for Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment and Paris for Marcel Carne and Jacques Prevert’s Children of Paradise.) And, despite the script, these actors know how to make the best of a great office or a dramatic opportunity.
    
The closing coda is great too. We get to see the Washington Post presses roll out a paper, and it’s almost as exciting as that tower of newsprint in the News on the March newsreel for Kane. And nostalgic. As newspapers struggle and fall all around us, we’re beginning to realize what an enormous loss we may suffer at their passing. So, in watching this flawed but sometimes exhilarating thriller, a lot of us can bid a fond, sad farewell to the world of journalism Friedberg’s office apotheosizes. I know I was. Farewell, Charles Foster Kane. Goodbye, Woodward and Bernstein. Adios, Ben Hecht. Toodle-oo Roy Bensinger. Maybe we’ll all meet again in a better world than this.
 
Anvil! The Story of Anvil (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; Sacha Gervasi (2009)
    
This funny, sad, terrific little documentary is about a band of fiftyish Canadian heavy metal rockers, who flirted with fame in the early ‘60s, didn’t make it, but have hung on ever since -- especially the groups’ two founding members, mercurial lead guitarist/singer Steve “Lips” Kudlow and the quieter, calmed drummer Robb Reiner, two guys who --like Mick Jagger and Keith Richard or John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, have been rocking out together since their mid-teen years.
    
The movie mostly shows them trying and failing to catch that brass ring that’s eluded them all these years, the dissolute glory ride that their old bill mates Bon Jovi and Whitesnake managed. But Anvil keeps suffering hammer-blows. They still have to keep their Toronto day jobs, as do current bandmates Ivan Herd and G5. Their European tour is botched by a well-meaning but disorganized manager. Their 13th record album, produced by crack music man Chris Tsangarides, fails to impress the company execs. (After all, heavy metal or not, they’re fifty.)
    
Does all that make the movie a more melancholy real life version of This is Spinal Tap? Not quite. These guys were maybe never as big as Spinal Tap, though they were good enough to be dubbed by somebody the “demigods of Canadian metal.” So, when they go to Japan for an a morning gig on a rock fest, and the kids scream “Anvil!“ we feel great for them -- and we feel great also because we know this movie, of course, is their break. (If there’s anything wrong with “Anvil!“ it’s that director/fan Gervasi doesn’t include enough music.) The power chords finally ring. How could a fan do better by them? Hey, if this movie doesn’t soften you up, you deserve a job as a record company exec.
 
17 Again (One-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; Burr Steers (2009)
    
What would you so if you had a chance to be reborn as your old 17 year old self -- and that self just happened to be Zac Efron?
    
Nuts! Sucker! You may think the world will be your high school oyster. But you’ll only wind up as the star of another bad Zac Efron movie, in a world where money talks, hunkie-boys strut and tweeners scream.
    
One thing you can say about this movie, is that it’s slightly better than High School Musical 3. (On the other hand, Plan Nine from Outer Space is better than High School Musical 3. Much better.) As imagined by director Burr Steers (Igby Goes Down) and writer Jason Filardi, this is the tangled tale of Mike O‘Donnell, whom we first see as a star point guard at 17, (played by Efron), walking off the court, deserting the big game and sacrificing a college basketball career to stand by his pregnant girlfriend Scarlet (Allison Miller).
    
After that heart-tugger, we see middle-aged Mike (played by Matt Perry, who looks like he needs a friend) who’s been kicked out by his wife, older Scarlet (Leslie Mann), put up by his lifelong chum and Star Wars and Lord of the Rings geek Ned (Thomas Lennon), and given a second chance by a strange, angelic old janitor (Brian Doyle Murray). This oddball cherub turns him back into young Mike. Only instead of getting shown the permutations of a Back to the Future or an It’s a Wonderful Life, Older Mike-turned-Young-Mike gets to see how the world will react if Zac Efron shows up again. (Hopefully, they won’t start making more High School Musical movies.)
    
So, instead of going back to the Past, Older Mike-as-Young-Mike is propelled into the world of today -- which makes for some pretty salty encounters with his wife Scarlet and daughter Maggie (Michelle Trachtenberg) and a strange mentoring of his son, whom he helpfully tries to de-virginize.) All these family affairs are --to adopt some older tween lingo - kind of icky-creepy. So is the movie, which also tries to get every phallic-symbol inch out of a pair of laser swords.
    
As for Efron, I’m willing to admit that he may be the new Rob Lowe, but I won’t go any further than that. He sure isn’t the new Brad Pitt. But this movie shows that he can act, if not pick scripts. Consider the possibilities. How about a remake of St. Elmo’s Fire for the Zac-man? How about a remake of Class with Michael Cera in the Andrew McCarthy role and Kate Beckinsale in Jackie Bisset‘s? (Or better yet, Jackie and Kate without any of them?) Or a remake of The Blue Lagoon with Miley Cyrus? Jamie Foxx, watch that mouth.
 
American Violet (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; Tim Disney (2009)
    
The American Civil Liberties Union may take a hammering from those blowhards on Fox News, but it actually supplies one of the heroes here in this slick, fact-based courtroom drama about a civil rights lawsuit in Texas. That’s David Cohen, a Yankee ACLU layer played by Tim Blake Nelson (one of the great Southern boys of The Coen Bros.' O Brother Where Art Thou?) Cohen comes to Texas and teams up with fair-minded local lawyer Sam Conroy (Will Patton) to help single mother Dee Roberts (Nicole Beharie) battle against false drug charges brought by an opportunistic, racist, highly popular D, A. named Calvin Beckett (Michael O‘Keefe). Beckett swept her up in a drug raid on her housing project and then employed his usual game plan of aggrandizing himself with voters by squeezing her to make a false “guilty” plea bargain.
    
The movie, an effective inspirational liberal piece, is fairly obvious. But it gets your motor racing anyway. Eat your heart out, Bill “Riled Up Riles” O’Reilly. They'll never hire you to play David Cohen. 
 
Is Anybody There? (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
U. K.; John Crowley (2009)
    
Michael Caine plays a fatherly, seedy old magician who opens up a world of wonders for British lad Edward (Bill Milner), who lives in his parents’ old folk home, in this sentimental drama from director John Crowley (who made the fine, rowdy Intermission) and writer Peter Harness. It‘s not as magical and marvelous as it could have been. And the elderly patients are often written a little too quaint or corny, despite a fine cast that includes Leslie Phillips and Peter Vaughan. But Caine rescues the movie, as he has many, many others, ever since he became an unlikely trail-blazing Cockney movie star in the ‘60s.
    
I saw Caine again recently in a snatch of 1966‘s Alfie on TV recently, and I had to marvel myself at his immense simpatico with the camera, at the way he effortlessly chats up the audience and how, endowing this selfish but charming London seducer with his blond good looks and pleasing manner, he was able to draw us right into the world of the movie. He does that here again as magician Clarence, and even though the movie takes a few bad turns, he keeps it on course. Caine is one leading actor who always leaves his mark, never lets us down.
 
The Song of Sparrows (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
Iran; Majid Majidi (2008)
    
A wonderful little movie from Majid Majidi, the superb Iranian writer-director whose finely wrought, crowd-pleasing, touchingly humanistic work I first encountered back in 1997, when I was on the Montreal Film Festival jury that awarded the Grand Prize to Majidi’s equally wonderful The Children of Heaven -- the stirring, Oscar-nominated film about a poor little eight year old boy who pins his dreams and redemption on a grand foot race. The Song of Sparrows is sadder, wiser, but it connects just as deeply.
    
The movie, beautifully shot and bursting with life, stars Majidi regular and Heaven vet Reza Naji, who won the Berlin Film Festival acting prize for his role here as Karim: an ostrich farm worker living in the Iranian countryside, who loses one of his ostriches and his job, and then, in an attempt to earn the money for his daughter’s lost hearing aid, plunges into the hurly-burly of Teheran. There, he makes a surprising success on his motorcycle as a freelance taxi driver.
    
Soon though, Karim gets trapped in a gas-guzzling routine of materialism and acquisition -- as he fills his family’s home and courtyard with junk and stuff, and his children try to strike it rich themselves, by clearing a well of pond scum and using it to breed goldfish. In the movie, which contrasts the spacious Pampas-like beauty of the ostrich country with the noisy, dirty bustle of Teheran, Majidi undercuts the rigidity of current Iranian mores and politics. He effectively critiques the perils of modernity and celebrates the joys off family life -- but not in an unconvincing, rote, phony way.
    
Iranian cinema is hamstrung by censorship, largely anti-sexual and anti-feminist, but, given this stacked deck, its filmmakers have often, like Majidi, Jafar Panahi or Abbas Kiarostami, excelled at simple humanistic films, often about children and poor people. Here Majidi, surrounding the excellent Naji with an all-amateur cast, triumphs again. This film, like many of the Iranian classics, shows the influence of Italian neo-realism, Vittorio De Sica and Bicycle Thieves. But it’s also lively and buoyant. Naji, as real and somber as the desperate father (amateur Lamberto Maggioranni), in Bicycle Thieves, is marvelous. So is the movie, which, like all Majidi’s films, opens your eyes and warms your heart. (In Farsi, with English subtitles.)

Read Michael Wilmington on DVDs

- Michael Wilmington
April 16, 2009

Recent Columns

4.09.09 - Observe and Report, Hannah Montana: The Movie, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Gigantic, and Sin Nombre
4.02.09 - Fast & Furious, Silent Light, Sugar, Adventureland, and Paris 36
3.26.09 - Monsters Vs. Aliens, The Haunting in Connecticut, Z, and Shall We Kiss?
3.19.09 - Duplicity, I Love You Man, Knowing, and The Great Buck Howard
3.12.09 - Miss March, Last House on the Left, Race to Witch Mountain, Brothers at War and Everlasting Moments
3.05.09 - Watchmen, Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29, and Waiting for Dublin
2.26.09 - Crossing Over and Two Lovers
2.19.09 - Fired Up!, Friday the 13th and Must Read After My Death
2.13.09 - The International, Confessions of a Shopaholic and Under the Sea 3-D
2.06.09 - Coraline, He's Just Not that Into You, The Pink Panther 2 and Fanboys
1.30.09 - New in Town and The Uninvited
1.23.09 - Revolutionary Road, Inkheart, Notorious and The Secret of the Grain
1.16.09 - Defiance, Hotel for Dogs and Paul Blart: Mall Cop
1.9.09 - Last Chance Harvey, Marley & Me, The Reader
1.2.09 - The Top Ten