Wish I Was Here

Wish I Was Here - Dir. Zach Braff (2014)

Zach Braff stirred up a little controversy when he launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund his second directorial effort, Wish I Was Here. Surely, Braff was living high on the hog off his big, fat Scrubs paychecks? Whether you agreed with Braff's methods for financing his film, the campaign successfully raised over $3 million.

It's been ten years since Braff made his directorial debut with Garden State, a movie that was critically praised by my peers and I. Looking back on it now; I find it cloying and overly precious though I can still admire Braff's visual whimsy. A decade later and it doesn't look like things have changed too much. Wish I Was Here is very much a spiritual sequel to Garden State. Braff's earlier picture was about an aimless twenty-something actor with a deceased mother and a disapproving father. Wish I Was Here is about an aimless thirty-something actor with a deceased mother and a disapproving father.

Wish I Was Here presents the notion that the angst and hipster melancholia of your 20's doesn't go away when you hit your 30's, despite getting married and raising a family in the suburbs.

Braff plays Aidan Bloom, an aspiring actor who hasn't had much luck since starring in a dandruff commercial a couple years ago. He has an icy relationship with his father Gabe (Mandy Patinkin), who pays for Aidan's children, Grace (Joey King) and Tucker (Pierce Gagnon), to attend an Orthodox Jewish school. Aidan's younger brother Noah (Josh Gad) has an even colder relationship with dad. They haven't seen each other in a long time while Noah lives in a trailer and spends his day writing nasty massages to celebrities on Twitter. Aidan's wife, Sarah (Kate Hudson), supports her husband's dream, but suffers silently at a menial job with the Water Department where she is regularly subjected to a co-worker's inappropriate comments.

Aidan is knocked for a loop when Gabe announces his cancer has aggressively returned. He has decided to spend whatever savings he has left on an experimental treatment, which means the kids can no longer afford to go to private school. Aidan decides that he'll home school Grace and Tucker until they can start public school next year. He finds the task much more daunting than anticipated.

Braff co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Adam and the results are a scattered mess. The narrative drifts into several detours along the way that include Noah's trip to Comic-Con to romance a cute cosplayer (Ashley Greene) and recurring fantasy sequences with Aidan as a sci-fi action hero. And did we really need to see the Bloom brood test drive an Aston Martin, aside from seeing Braff reunited with Scrubs co-star Donald Faison? Braff uses creative shorthand when it comes to spelling out his message by quoting T.S. Eliot or Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" while they repair a fence. Braff also slathers on the dreamy qualities of Wish I Was Here by lacing the soundtrack with classic folk rock (Paul Simon, Bob Dylan) and modern indie favorites (The Shins, Bon Iver). Still, Braff's playfulness is on display, such as staring at an empty display that reads, "This pamphlet will save your life."

At least, the acting is well done across the board with Mandy Patinkin as a standout. He brings stoicism and a dry sense of humor to the role. Kate Hudson is a delight and it's nice to see her in something of substance for a change. Both Joey King and Pierce Gagnon are great with a precociousness that feels authentic rather than forced. In particular, Gagnon seems to have a preternatural ability for the screen with his previous role being the ominous child in Looper. The late-James Avery makes a cameo appearance in an amusing scene where Aidan goes to an audition without realizing that the role is now for an African-American.

First world problems come to mind when discussing the drama of Wish I Was Here. It's hard to sympathize with an inert protagonist whose major issue is possibly getting a 9 to 5 job. Your enjoyment of Braff's sophomore film will depend on your love of Garden State and tolerance for schmaltz.

Rating: ** ½ (*****)

Gamer

Gamer - Dir. Neveldine/Taylor (2009)

The purveyors of punk cinema and anarchic action, the duo known as Neveldine/Taylor wrote and directed Crank and Crank 2: High Voltage, two of my favorite guilty pleasures. Over-the-top, cartoonish, vulgar, and sophomoric, the Crank films were infused by video game conventions and sold like crack to today’s Red Bull generation. Neveldine/Taylor continues their brand of video game-infused cinema with Gamer, a film that acts as an updated version of The Running Man.

At some nebulous point in the future, mega-billionaire Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall) develops a form of nanotechnology that allows one person to control another via the internet. Castle initially uses this new tech for Society, think The Sims with real people. Here, folks are dressed in neon day-glo pimp raver fetish gear and forced to copulate, drug themselves, and laugh off grievous injury. Castle’s next big hit is Slayers, where Death Row inmates can win their chance at freedom by competing in a real life first-person shooter.

The biggest star of Slayers is Kable (Gerard Butler taking on the Jason Statham role) who is only three games away from becoming a free man. Kable’s only thoughts are for his wife Angie (Amber Valleta), a reluctant cast member of Society, and their daughter who was put into foster care. Of course, forces are working against Kable to prevent him from winning the game, not the least of which is Kable’s whiny rich boy controller.

Crank has all the trademarks of Neveldine and Taylor’s sledgehammer sense of plot. There’s the morbidly obese pervert who controls Angie in Society while dipping his foot in greasy vats of maple syrup. There’s Hall’s evil tycoon character whose acts of malevolence include world domination, a bad country fried southern accent, and wearing loafers without socks. The world of Slayers looks like a futuristic combination of Saving Private Ryan and Call of Duty while the action is shot with the usual handheld cameras and rapid-fire edits. However, Gamer has none of the breakneck energy of the Crank films. Neveldine & Taylor attempt to get more serious with Gamer by attempting to slow the pace and pile on the social commentary. The attempt falls flat on its face. It’s hard to take a dramatic turn when you’ve got Michael C. Hall leading a gang of goons in a song-and-dance number set to Sammy Davis Jr.’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

Gamer gathers together a strong cast with some surprising faces filling out the supporting cast. Neveldine and Taylor score their second failure in being unable to utilize any of them properly. Alison Lohman, hot off her lead role in Drag Me to Hell, appears oh so briefly as a member of a revolutionary hacker group. Zoe Bell pops in as a fellow Slayer only to get her head blown off a minute later. You’d figure if someone were to cast actors like Kyra Sedgwick or Heroes’ Milo Ventimiglia, they’d have them do something of note.

Gamer pales in comparison to District 9. It suffers from a poorly thought-out story full of bland action that builds to an incredibly anti-climactic ending. Sorry, but that dream match between King Leonidas and Dexter didn’t live up to expectations.

Rating: * ½

State of Play

State of Play - Dir. Kevin Macdonald (2009)

Just like Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, State of Play was based on a BBC mini-series. Having not seen the origin British production, I can’t speculate as to how the American remake matches up to it. I will say that State of Play is a perfectly acceptable thriller that tries to evoke the themes of 70’s classics such as All the President’s Men with a hint of The Parallax View.

State of Play begins with a young African-American male with a history of drug problems and felonies being murdered in an alley late at night. The police probably would have let this one fade away if not for a bicyclist witnessing the shooting and also being killed. Cal McCaffrey (Russell Crowe) is the veteran reporter assigned to the case by the Washington Globe and his tough-as-nails editor Cameron Lynne (Helen Mirren). That very morning, Sonia Baker (Maria Thayer), the beautiful aide to Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) is killed in a supposed accident on a subway platform. Collins is a rising star in political circles as he heads an investigative committee looking into the inner workings of PointCorp, a private security firm and obvious stand-in for Blackwater. Young and handsome, he’s the type of TV-friendly politico that John F. Kennedy Jr. may have been if not for his premature death. Alas, Collins is more John Edwards than John John as it comes out he was having an affair with Baker. Robin Wright Penn plays Collins’ dutiful wife, Anne, who reluctantly chooses to stand by her man for the big press conferences.

McCaffrey was once Collins’ roommate in college and it’s hinted at that he also had an affair with Anne years ago. Lynne wants to use McCaffrey’s relationship with the tarnished congressman to assist in the story being written up by the Globe’s online blogger, Della Frye (Rachel McAdams). McCaffrey and Frye begin working together in an adversarial capacity. The elder journalist feels she is a glorified gossip monger and can’t stand that she has a high-tech laptop and doesn’t seem to own a pen. Eventually she takes on a mentor role and teaches her to get out from behind a desk and use old-fashioned legwork to get the scoop.

Though the film takes a uniquely American point-of-view to the proceedings, it is the Scottish Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) who helms the picture. Macdonald is backed up by a script written up by a team of crackerjack screenwriters all of whom are well-equipped to handle these ripped-from-the-headlines, twisty turny story. Among those who contributed to the script include Matthew Michael Carnahan (The Kingdom, Lions For Lambs), Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), Billy Ray (Breach, Shattered Glass), plus an uncredited rewrite from Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon). They manage to find some balance between the wealth of characters and subplots. There are a few bumps in the road that may take you by surprise and a few you can see coming. Perhaps, the weakest point in the film is the third act resolution which tries to fit in a few too many twists while wrapping all the dangling plotlines far too neatly.

The political scandals may make up the meat of the story, but the underlying themes of print versus online media are a far more fascinating aspect to State of Play. The clash between the old-school and the new-school. Further on point is the added effect of the economic slump to the financial viability of the newspaper. My local paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, recently laid off just under 200 workers following similar layoffs last year. Filmmakers added an extra layer of resonance as we watch the latest headlines move through the massive printing press on its way to the public. If only there were a lame-legged newsie hawking copies on the local street corner, shouting ”Extry, extry.”

During early development, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton were attached to the roles of McCaffrey and Collins, respectively. We may not have gotten a Fight Club reunion, but Russell Crowe is more believable as the weary, slovenly McCaffrey than Pitt. It’s not a surprising role for Crowe following similar ones in American Gangster and Body of Lies. Affleck has the good looks for Collins, yet lacks the range of Norton to bring the character truly to life. Some of his line readings are flat. The best performances out of the A-list ensemble belong to supporting players Jason Bateman as a sleazy, drug-addled PR man and Jeff Daniels as an oily elder statesman.

State of Play isn’t the ingenious thriller the cast and crew had hoped it would be. It is, however, a popcorn film for those seeking something deeper than expensive CGI and loud explosions.

Rating: ***

Crank: High Voltage

Crank: High Voltage - Dirs. Neveldine/Taylor (2009)


He was dead…but then he got better.

Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor will never be confused with other dynamic directorial duos like the Coen Brothers. The films of Neveldine/Taylor are for the generation who shotgun Red Bulls for all-night sessions of Grand Theft Auto. The trash cinema tag team made their debuts with Crank, the closest a movie has ever come to being a live-action adaptation of a video game. Though it wasn’t based on any existing game, it unashamedly basked in the conventions of ultra-violent shooters and low-grade action flicks. Their next film, Gamer, appears to be a flawless fusion of the genres. The sequel to their first movie, Crank: High Voltage, provides more of the same.

The ever-grimacing Jason Statham returns as hitman Chev Chelios. In the first film, he was poisoned by Chinese gangsters and had to keep his adrenaline pumping in order to stave off the effects of the drugs. Chelios caused all kinds of mayhem and ran afoul of the Chinese, Latino gangbangers, and L.A. law enforcement. Despite falling out of a helicopter at the end of the original, someone apparently hit the continue button and Chelios is back. This time around, black marketers are planning on harvesting his organs and replaced his heart with an artificial one to keep him alive. Chelios breaks out and must keep his new ticker electrically charged. This means smashing people in the face while hooking jumper cables to his nipples. He even attempts to dry hump an old lady to cause static electricity.

Those of you expecting a subtle, heartwarming night at the movies must have wandered into the wrong theater. Crank: High Voltage is an assault on the senses with its hyperkinetic camerawork and whiplash style editing. There’s tons of nudity including a shootout in a strip club. One dancer gets shot in the implants causing them to ooze silicone. We also get an extended rapid-fire sex scene between Statham and Amy Smart (as Chelios’s girlfriend Eve) in the middle of a horse racetrack. An attempted girl-on-girl sex scene tells you exactly the audience they’re going for. Throw in a Godzilla-inspired Kaiju battle and this Crank sequel is the perfect fix for any pop culture junkie.

Though Crank: High Voltage can be a fun, no-holds barred action picture, it can also be unbearably embarrassing. Neveldine and Taylor obviously have a shallow bag of tricks and they dip into the same gags over and over again. Multiple characters are struck in the groin on numerous, painful occasions. A member of the supporting cast suffers from full body Tourette’s syndrome and goes into convulsions out of nowhere. These bits are mildly amusing at first, but get annoying when repeated ad nauseum. To top things off, Bai Ling (as a ‘Me so horny’ hooker) and David Carradine (as an old Chinese crime boss) play roles so stereotypical that they set Asians back by a hundred years. Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s was far kinder to the image of Asians everywhere.

I’ll give Neveldine/Taylor credit for going straight for the jugular with their Crank films. They won’t win any awards with high society, but if you’re looking for a pure, unadulterated B-movie experience you can’t go wrong with a Crank double feature. Statham may not be the most multi-faceted actor, but he excels in these roles as unstoppable ass kicker.

Crank: High Voltage is also packed with cameos galore including former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell as Chev’s mother, Lauren Holly as a horny psychiatrist, a sleazy looking Corey Haim (with mullet), and porn stars Ron Jeremy and Jenna Haze. Not that I’d know who those are…

Rating: **