Bad Words

Bad Words - Dir. Jason Bateman (2014)

While he's directed episodes of several television series, Jason Bateman hasn't helmed a feature film until Bad Words, a subversive comedy set in the world of spelling bees. This is assuredly not a documentary in the vein of Spellbound or a feel-good drama ala Akeelah and the Bee.

Bateman is Guy Trilby, a 40-year old misanthrope who enters the Golden Quill, a national spelling tournament for children. It turns out Guy never finished junior high and he exploits a loophole in the rules that state no entrant must have passed the eighth grade. Much to the chagrin of tournament director Dr. Bernice Deagan (Allison Janney) and founder Dr. William Bowman (Philip Baker Hall), Guy is actually a genius and might just win the whole damn thing. Guy's only competition is Chaitanya Chopra (Rohan Chand), an affable 10-year old whose cheery disposition remains unwavering in the face of Guy's utter contempt. Luckily, Chaitanya is saved from Guy's more disreputable actions to disrupt the bee. At one point, he sprays ketchup on a girl's trousers and tricks her into thinking she's having her period.

The screenplay for Bad Words was written by newcomer Andrew Dodge. It made the Black List, a compendium for hot, but unproduced scripts, back in 2011. It's easy to see why studios were gun shy of Bad Words since the protagonist is an unrepentant jerk whose behavior borders on child abuse.

Jason Bateman has excelled at playing the straight man thrust into absurd situations. On Arrested Development, his Michael Bluth was the lone beacon of sanity surrounded by a family of lunatics. In Bad Words, Bateman actively plays against his nice guy image, but still spews every line of venom with his trademark deadpan delivery. He never shows one ounce of gratitude towards Jenny Widgeon (Kathryn Hahn), a hapless online reporter who sponsors Guy and even pays for his meals and accommodations. The two of them engage in casual, awkward sex in which Jenny repeatedly orders Guy not to look at her. Hahn is always terrific in these supporting roles, which require her to fearlessly leap into outrageous situations. Allison Janney and Philip Baker Hall are great foils for Bateman though you can't help feel that they are a bit wasted in such one note roles.

The main thrust of the film centers on the friendship between Guy and Chaitanya, which forms against all odds, but is thoroughly in line with movie conventions. Bateman's experience as a child actor likely helped coax a naturalistic performance out of doe-eyed and precocious Rohan Chand. It's all summed up in a montage set to the Beastie Boys as Guy and Chaitanya run amok in a spree of shoplifting, pranks, and a visit to a prostitute so the kid can see his first boobs. On one hand, you sort of root for the two to bond given Chaitanya's troubles with bullies and his ultra-stern father. Yet, it's a difficult task to remain in Guy's corner when he's hurling racist insults at the boy, ones that aren't even that creative like "slumdog" and "curry hole."

Can you spell, 'misfire?' Bad Words never had the convictions to go full force in creating a truly reprehensible protagonist. It tries hard to make Guy unlikeable while still making him likeable enough for that third act emotional payoff when all is revealed. Bateman has the talent to make it work, but the humor goes for pure shock value rather than anything creative.

Rating: ** (*****)

Walk of Shame

Walk of Shame – Dir. Steven Brill (2014)

Everybody has a bad day, but chances are they were nothing like the bad day suffered by Elizabeth Banks in Walk of Shame, a raunchy comedy that's a mash-up of The Hangover and After Hours.

Banks stars as Meghan Miles, a news reporter who is in line for a promotion to lead anchor and about to get married. However, everything falls apart in quick fashion. Her handsome fiancé (Oliver Hudson) dumps her while the new promotion goes to someone else. Meghan decides to blow off some steam with her best friends, feisty Rose (Gillian Jacobs) and dim bulb Denise (Sarah Wright), for a night of drinking and debauchery. Meghan spends the night with handsome bartender Gordon (James Marsden). Since this is Los Angeles, he's not really a bartender, he's actually a writer. Either way, he's living in a hip loft that neither a bartender nor a struggling writer could afford.

Meghan receives a late night phone call from her producer (Willie Garson) that the anchor position is open once more after the prospective candidate was fired due to some embarrassing photos. Meghan tries to rush to the studio, but her car (with her purse and ID inside) has been towed away. She's locked out of the building and can't remember which apartment was Gordon's. Oh, and she forgot her cell phone after being frightened by her one night stand's cat. Meghan finds herself wandering the streets in a skin-tight yellow dress, which causes everyone to mistake her for a hooker.

Walk of Shame was written and directed by Steven Brill, whose resume includes Little Nicky, Mr. Deeds, and Drillbit Taylor. That will give you a good clue as to the level of sophistication at play here. Walk of Shame derives much of its humor from racial stereotypes and the humiliation of its starlet. Banks stumbles around and becomes the subject of scorn by judgmental bystanders and a pair of smug police officers (Bill Burr, Ethan Suplee). If they aren't lecturing her, then they're propositioning her, such as a devout Jew believing she was sent by the devil to tempt her or a horny kid who wants to get a look at her boobs. The only helpful individuals Meghan encounters are three gangsters who offer her shelter in a crack house before it's attacked by a rival gang.

To be fair, Banks does her best. Her beauty and winning personality still shine through the dull material. She's a bright woman who is forced to act foolishly for the sake of the screenplay. The central joke involving her figure hugging attire doesn't even work. In L.A., that's dressing conservatively. Out of all the contrivances that force Meghan into her precarious predicament, one is surprisingly clever. Even when she's able to make a call, Meghan can't remember anyone's number since they were saved in her old phone. Welcome to the 21^st century. Marsden is well cast, but he isn't given much to do outside of being the genial love interest. Fans of stand-up comedy might enjoy the brief appearances by Bill Burr, Bryan Callen as a sketchy drug dealer, and Tig Notaro as an extremely unhelpful owner of an impound lot. There's also Ken Davitian as a taxi driver and Kevin Nealon as a traffic reporter with an odd personal life.

In more capable hands, Walk of Shame might have had something profound to say about slut shaming and internet infamy. Instead, we get another comedy that goes for the lowest hanging fruit available.

Rating: * ½ (*****)

Maleficent

Maleficent - Dir. Robert Stromberg (2014)

"Let us tell an old story anew and we will see how well you know it."

So begins Disney's latest attempt to mine their rich archives and re-imagine a classic fairy tale, both of which have become big business. Alice in Wonderland scored over a billion dollars at the box office to get the ball rolling. The House of Mouse has a live-action version of Cinderella coming in 2015 along with remakes of The Jungle Book and Beauty and the Beast in development. Maleficent is Disney's most radical interpretation of the classic tale of Sleeping Beauty, told from the point of view of one of their most iconic villain.

In a medieval fantasy land, there was an enchanted forest known as the Moors, which neighbored the kingdom of man. In the Moors, lived a young fairy named Maleficent (played as an adult by Angelina Jolie) who came across a farm boy Stefan (who eventually becomes Shalto Copley) as he attempted to steal a gem. The two grow close, but further apart as time goes on. Stefan is driven by his ambition to one day become king, a Herculean task given his station in life. Yet, he manages to worm his way into King Henry's (Kenneth Cranham) inner circle, just as his forces suffer a debilitating loss as they attempt to conquer the Moors. The dying King decrees that the one who brings him the head of Maleficent will inherit the throne. Stefan betrays Maleficent by drugging her though he is unable to go through with it. Instead, he cuts off her wings and brings them to the King. Maleficent awakens in horror and the forest grows dark in sync with her pain and anger. Meanwhile, Stefan is crowned the new monarch, marries King Henry's daughter, and they have a child of their own, Aurora (Elle Fanning).

Maleficent makes a grand entrance during the baby's christening and places a curse upon her. On her 16^th birthday, Aurora will prick her finger on the needle of a spinning wheel and fall into a deep sleep with true love's kiss the only thing that will awaken her. King Stefan orders all spinning wheels in the land destroyed and for Aurora to live in anonymity with three fairies: Knotgrass, Flittle & Thistlewit (Imelda Staunton, Lesley Manville & Juno Temple).

Maleficent marks the directorial debut of Robert Stromberg, a veteran visual effects artist and production designer who won Academy Awards for his work on Avatar and Alice in Wonderland. Maleficent is certainly dripping with eye candy though anyone who has seen those aforementioned films, along with Oz: The Great and Powerful (another of Stromberg's projects), will see nothing new. The enchanted forest is a glowing world of pixies, goblins, and living trees, but there's not a lot to differentiate it from Pandora or Wonderland. The score by James Newton Howard feels just as rehashed, trying too hard to sound like the work of Danny Elfman.

Maleficent is practically a one-woman show with Angelina Jolie giving a towering performance as the title role. Makeup by Rick Baker accentuates her otherworldly beauty with pronounced cheekbones, cat-like eyes, and her trademark crown of horns. Jolie clearly has a passion for the character and relates to the movie's themes as an adoptive mother and a woman who underwent a double mastectomy. The film positions Maleficent as a tragic figure demonized for decades by patriarchal oppression. The scene in which she loses her wings is an obvious metaphor for sexual assault, but the screenplay by Linda Woolverton (who turned Alice into a Joan of Arc-esque heroine) never fully follows through with these elements. Even at a brisk 97 minutes, the plot feels padded out. The disjointed nature could be chalked up to multiple rewrites (including uncredited work by Paul Dini) and reshoots supervised by John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, Saving Mr. Banks). The pivotal moment when Maleficent places the curse on little Aurora stands as a highlight with Jolie really sinking her teeth into the role. The rest of Maleficent never lives up to the promise of this sequence.

The second act derails the entire movie as it focuses on Aurora being reared by the bumbling fairies. It's not that these characters are stupid; it's that they are Homer Simpsons stupid. They are so idiotic that there's no possible way Darwinism hadn't already done them in. Maleficent secretly observes them in bemusement while making sure the fairies don't accidentally poison Baby Aurora or allow her to wander off a cliff. Disney was able to cast three splendid actresses for the parts, but have them do nothing but forced slapstick. When they aren't slapping each other like the fairy tale Three Stooges, they're trapped in the uncanny valley as computer generated creatures that never look quite right. The filmmakers also had the opportunity to create a complicated villain in Stefan, but chose to turn him into a one-note baddie. Stefan descends into madness and you wonder if he cares at all about his wife or daughter. He becomes a paranoid shut-in who hears voices in his head. At this point, regicide would be entirely justified. Elle Fanning as little to do as Aurora who is rendered as little more than a wide-eyed china doll. The inclusion of the dragon and Prince Phillip (Brenton Thwaites) are simply perfunctory nods to the original animated picture.

In recent years, Disney has done a fine job in creating stronger female characters after decades of pretty princesses passively waiting for their Prince Charming. Maleficent falls in line with recent releases such as Brave, Tangled, and Frozen, but doesn't do anything interesting with the subject matter aside from presenting a special effects extravaganza. This is the same story as seen before in Wicked, Oz, and Once Upon a Time. There was an aura of menace and mystique with the original Maleficent that disappears in the 2014 version. Darth Vader, Wolverine, and Michael Myers didn't benefit from an origin story and neither did Maleficent.

Rating: ** (*****)

Transformers: Age of Extinction

Transformers: Age of Extinction - Dir. Michael Bay (2014)

"A new era has begun. The age of the Transformers is over…"

Oh, where to even begin with this movie. We might as well start with the plot, such as it is. Transformers: Dark of the Moon concluded with the heroic Autobots repelling a Decepticon invasion that left Chicago devastated and 1200 humans dead. Age of Extinction picks up five years later as the American government has cut all ties with the Autobots. CIA agent Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer) heads up an off-the-books operation that involves hunting down all Transformers, regardless of whether they are Autobots or Decepticons. The robots are harvested for parts and shipped to Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci), the brilliant head of a technological conglomerate. Joyce has discovered an unstable metal dubbed "Transformium," which he and Attinger plan to use to create their own army of Transformers. In order to gather more of the metal, Attinger has struck an alliance with the bounty hunter Lockdown (Mark Ryan). In exchange for capturing Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), Lockdown will give Attinger the Seed, a terraforming device that would create Transformium.

In Texas, Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) is a down-on-his-luck inventor who is struggling to pay the mortgage on his farm and send his daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz), to college. He purchases a rundown semi-truck hoping to find something salvageable. The exasperated Tessa can only remark that he's just turning junk into other junk, which could be a perfect metaphor for this entire franchise. The truck turns out to be Optimus Prime and his presence alerts a CIA strike team led by the remorseless Savoy (Titus Welliver). Now classified as fugitives, Optimus and the few remaining Autobots must protect their new human allies.

The human protagonists from the previous movies are gone and forgotten with nary a fleeting reference. Not that the new characters are an improvement, they are all just as bland and uninteresting. Sure, Mark Wahlberg is a better protagonist than Shia LaBeouf, but his being an inventor bears no little impact on the plot. He never invents anything to defeat the Decepticons, he just grabs an alien gun and shoots stuff. On the other hand, producers are wise enough to fill the supporting cast with actors like Stanley Tucci, Kelsey Grammer, and Titus Welliver to lend some legitimacy to the ridiculousness. Grammer and Welliver play standard issue cardboard villains, but Tucci has fun hamming it up as an evil Steve Jobs. If you didn't get that reference, there's a black and white portrait of Tucci in a turtleneck sweater hanging prominently in the background.

As Michael Bay's latest ingénue, Nicola Peltz isn't given any opportunity to differentiate herself from Megan Fox or Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. Peltz is dressed in cutoff shorts just like Fox and even uses a tow truck to assist the Autobots during the climax. There are plenty of shots from between her legs as the camera leers at her thighs and buttocks. The way Michael Bay fetishizes Peltz feels dirty when you consider that her character is 17, despite the actress being 19 in real life. However, that's nothing compared to the sequence in which Bay justifies statutory rape. Tessa's boyfriend, Shane (Jack Reynor), a 20-year old Irish race car driver, pulls out a copy of a "Romeo & Juliet" law allowing the two of them to be together since they dated before he turned 18. Yes, one of the heroes in Age of Extinction, is a creep who carries around a photocopy of a law that allows him to have sex with an underage girl. In a film about giant robots from outer space, why is this subject even being broached?

Congratulations to Michael Bay for hitting all new lows though the usual trademarks of a Bay production are present here. We have the rampant misogyny represented by the fact that nearly every female character in the movie is thin and impossibly gorgeous. The only exception is the sassy, overweight black woman who serves as comic relief. Aside from Peltz, the only other actresses who receive any significant screen time are Sophia Myles as a geologist and Li Bingbing as an executive in Joyce's employ. They are just as one-note as everybody else in the whole series and both women appear and disappear whenever it's convenient for the plot. Li Bingbing's inclusion and an entire third act set in Hong Kong is a blatant attempt to pander to Chinese audiences, who have become increasingly vital to the wallets of studio executives. The product placement throughout Age of Extinction is equally forced with actors shoving Bud Lights and Beats speakers into your face in full IMAX 3D. One would think Bay was doing this with a hint of irony, but it's hard to tell anymore. Next, we have racist caricatures in the form of Drift (Ken Watanabe), an Autobot modeled after a samurai who speaks in Haikus composed of broken English.

Just as he couldn't be bothered to come up with unique personalities for the humans, screenwriter Ehren Kruger couldn't be bothered to do anymore with the Autobots. Hound (John Goodman) fulfills the exact same role as Ironhide that of the grizzled war veteran while Bumblebee gets surprisingly little screen time given his popularity. Lockdown is the most interesting villain in the series, a Transformer who owes no allegiance to either the Autobots or Decepticons. He works for the mysterious Creators (the Quintessons?) who originally built the Transformers as slave labor. Also, long-time fans might be pleased to hear Frank Welker return to voice Megatron who has now been upgraded to Galvatron ala Transformers: The Movie. The designs of the Transformers have also been improved so that the viewer can actually differentiate one robot from the other. The biggest additions to the robotic roster are the fan-favorite Dinobots. Prepare for Devastator-sized disappointment, folks, you will have to wait over two hours into the movie before the Dinobots appear, despite them serving as lynchpins of the marketing campaign.

If you're wondering how Kruger spent his time during the script writing process, it certainly wasn't crafting scintillating dialogue. Nobody was expecting David Mamet in a Transformers picture, but you'd think Kruger would at least put a modicum of effort beyond, "Take that bitch" or "Do you have a warrant?" "My face is my warrant." And it's always thrilling to hear Optimus Prime, the noble warrior that he is, running around rooftops screaming, "I'll kill you."

SPOILERS: At the end of the movie, Optimus shoots off into outer space with the aid of rocket boosters in his feet, which begs the question why didn't he use them before, instead of turning into a truck to slowly save the day? Also, he threatens to kill the Dinobots unless they join forces with him. Then, Optimus lets them loose on the Chinese countryside because it's always a great idea to have mechanical dinosaurs running around completely unfettered.

Story has never been Michael Bay's strong suit. It's traditionally been incidental to the visuals. The last three films suffered from action sequences that descended into incoherent visual noise, but Bay's camerawork seems to grown more patient in Age of Extinction. This allows Bay to make good use of 3D imagery, particularly during a set piece wherein the Cade and Tessa dangle precariously from grabbling cables high above Chicago, a city which shows no evidence of serving as ground zero for an alien invasion a few short years ago. Bay takes a page out of Terrence Malick's playbook by shooting the farm scenes at golden hour with actors silhouetted against the backdrop of a beautiful orange sky. The beauty is almost undone when you realize Bay's idea of small town Texas is a Bostonian, a surfer dude, an Irishman, and a girl who struts around the rural countryside in high heeled boots.

Transformers: Age of Extinction runs two hours and forty-five minutes, a punishing length filled with inane dialogue, illogical plot developments, and relentless stupidity. Revenge of the Fallen still stands as the worst of the bunch, but it has the excuse of being rushed into production during the writer's strike. Age of Extinction has no excuse. However, none of that will mean a damn thing because audiences still eat these movies up with a spoon. The fourth Transformers film scored over $300 million worldwide during opening weekend. If you enjoy Transformers, then more power to you. Personally, I find it sad that this is a resounding success while Edge of Tomorrow, a far better written blockbuster with one of the strongest female characters in recent memory, was a box office flop.

Rating: ** (*****)