Mortdecai

Mortdecai - Dir. David Koepp (2015)

Oh, Johnny Depp, what have you done?

There’s no doubting that Johnny Depp is an iconoclastic performer. He was always a well-respected actor who finally shot into the upper stratosphere of superstardom after Pirates of the Caribbean. Ever since the emergence of Jack Sparrow, Depp’s track record has been rather iffy. His high-profile roles in Alice in Wonderland, The Lone Ranger, and Dark Shadows were criticized for being nothing more than one-note cartoon characters. Is he simply trying to recapture the magic of Captain Jack?

Depp doesn’t do himself any favors with yet another overly mannered performance in Mortdecai, based on a series of novels by Kyril Bonfiglioli.

Lord Charlie Mortdecai is a renowned art dealer and a self-absorbed aristocrat. He also owes £8 million in back taxes to the British government, much to the dismay of his long-suffering wife Johanna (Gwyneth Paltrow). Meanwhile, a valuable Goya painting has been stolen during a restoration. As it turns out, the stolen painting leads to yet another long-lost Goya that would be priceless on its own. The artwork was looted by the Nazis during WWII and Hermann Goering himself was rumored to have written the numbers to his Swiss bank accounts on the back of the canvas. Now, a litany of ne’er do wells are after the paintings from a Russian gangster (Ulrich Thomsen) to notorious terrorist Emil Strago (Jonny Pasvolsky). MI5’s Inspector Alistair Martland (Ewan McGregor) must enlist the aid of Mortdecai, who is reluctant to agree because Martland holds an unrequited torch for Johanna.

There’s a part of me that actually admires that a film like Mortdecai was actually made. It’s the type of picture no one makes anymore, a throwback to the old screwball comedies of Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges with a dash of The Pink Panther. Despite the best efforts of Depp and Paltrow, their dialogue has none of the same snap or wit. Chalk that up to screenwriter Eric Aronson whose last credit was the dubious On the Line starring ‘N Sync’s Lance Bass. Mortdecai’s idea of humor revolves around Johanna gagging at the prospect of kissing her hubby’s ludicrous mustache, a nymphomaniac played by Olivia Munn, and Mortdecai nearly getting his testicles hooked to a car battery.

David Koepp directed Mortdecai and he’s a filmmaker who knows his stuff. He’s written big blockbusters such as Jurassic Park and Spider-Man, along with directing psychological thrillers (Secret Window), rom-coms (Ghost Town), and action (Premium Rush). Koepp clearly drew inspiration from classics like Charade and How to Steal a Million in attempting to make Mortdecai a modern globetrotting caper. If you remember, Depp already starred in one of these (The Tourist) and the results weren’t any better. Koepp is really let down by the flat material. The slapstick lacks any energy and the whole thing drags on interminably.

As Depp borrowed heavily from Keith Richards for his turn as Jack Sparrow, he draws from British comedian Terry-Thomas for his performance and look as Mortdecai, right down to the gap in his teeth. Sadly, Depp seems content with performing shtick than any sort of subtleties and it becomes tiresome in the long run. Paltrow gets to dust off her British accent, but her and Depp don’t have the chemistry that she and Robert Downey Jr. do. The one highlight in Mortdecai is Paul Bettany, who clearly relishes the opportunity to do some comedy for a change. Bettany goes Cockney to play Mortdecai’s manservant/bodyguard Jock.

One can imagine Mortdecai working had it come along in the 60’s with Peter Sellers or Terry-Thomas himself in the title role. Today, Mortdecai is an anachronistic bore. It seems as if all Johnny Depp hoped for was to amuse himself and on that level he succeeded.

Rating: * (*****)

Magic Mike

Magic Mike - Dir. Steven Soderbergh (2012)

Magic Mike could easily be dismissed as "that male stripper movie." Indeed, the ad campaign seems to sell it as fun times with a beefcake bonanza. The fact that 98% of the audiences I saw attending the screenings opening weekend were female deems the marketing a success. However, don't go in expecting Magic Mike to be a campy, gender-reversed version of Showgirls. The movie is surprisingly deep and a bit of a bummer. You can thank director Steven Soderbergh for bringing a little substance to all the glittery thongs and bare buttocks on display. Magic Mike is the male companion to Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience with a dash of Flashdance and Boogie Nights thrown in for good measure.

The titular Magic Mike is played by Channing Tatum, who was inspired to make the film by his time working as a male stripper after dropping out of college. The screenplay was written by his producing partner Reid Carolin.

By day, Mike is a part-time construction worker and owns an auto detailing van though we never see him do any of the latter. At night, he is the star attraction at Xquisite, located in the heart of the bustling nightclub scene of Tampa, Florida. Mike doesn't want to strip forever. He has aspirations of running a custom furniture business. He crafts tables from the flotsam and jetsam that wash up on the beach. That encapsulates one of the primary themes in Magic Mike, finding a purpose for the unwanted debris of society. Right on cue, Mike meets Adam (Alex Pettyfer), a college dropout sleeping on his sister's couch. Adam blew a football scholarship after punching out his coach and gets fired on the first day by the foreman. Safe to say, he has impulse control issues.

Mike takes Adam under his wing and nicknames him, "The Kid," where he joins a small cast of well-toned studs that includes Big Dick Richie (Joe Manganiello), Tito (CSI: Miami's Adam Rodriguez), Ken the living doll (Matt Bomer), and former dancer turned emcee Dallas (Matthew McConaughey). As Adam descends deeper into his hedonistic lifestyle, Mike finds potential for a fresh start and a pure romance with Adam's sister, Brooke (Cody Horn).

Magic Mike is a lot more thoughtful than the ad campaign would have you believe. Yes, there is a lot of flesh with Tatum dancing up a storm and dusting off his Step Up moves. The club isn't a normal strip club, but a dance revue where the men perform elaborate skits dressed as firemen, sailors, soldiers, and cowboys. Yes, there is the obligatory number set to "It's Raining Men." Surprisingly, the film has more female nudity than male as we get a Tatum butt shot within minutes quickly followed by a topless Olivia Munn.

The story is steeped in the current zeitgeist of country's economic fallout. This theme is never more apparent than a scene in which Mike fails to secure a small business loan (he's considered distressed) from a bank representative played by Breaking Bad's Betsy Brandt. Mike rifles off a great comeback line, "I watch the news. Ya'll are the ones who are distressed." Magic Mike shares similarities with The Wrestler in that both feature protagonists selling their bodies to survive. While Randy the Ram destroys his for the entertainment of the fans, Mike must keep his in pristine condition. The comparisons go further when you note that one of the strippers is Kevin Nash, a 7ft. tall former professional wrestler. Nash is in his fifties and has two bad knees due to a litany of injuries. In the movie, he is Tarzan and dances in a loincloth with an obvious leg brace because he doesn't know how to do anything else. He's the cautionary tale, the road where Mike may be headed.

Mike himself is played with easy-going charm by Channing Tatum, who has never been considered one of today's great thespians. But, Soderbergh knows how to utilize his actors within their own limitations. He made Gina Carano into a believable action star through stoicism and a terse amount of dialogue. In The Girlfriend Experience, he had porn star Sasha Grey exude a cold detachment that could have been a wooden performance in any other movie. In Magic Mike, he lets Tatum be himself, a loveable lug who sometimes stumbles over his own words. Tatum's scenes with Cody Horn are some of the film's best. When Soderbergh keeps the camera at a distance, he makes it feel as if the audience is eavesdropping on a pair of young lovers. The reviews of Horn's performance are all over the map. A few critics have bashed her for being cardboard or that she only got the job because her father, Alan Horn, chairman of Walt Disney Studios and former president of Warner Bros, who produced Magic Mike. I choose to give her a thumbs up. Just like Tatum, Horn gives a naturalistic performance. You cannot say the same for Alex Pettyfer, who lacks the charisma and presence of his co-stars, particularly Matthew McConaughey. The handsome actor with the trademark Texas drawl has undergone a career resurgence. No longer content with doing crappy romantic comedies with Kate Hudson, McConaughey has taken on daring low-budget projects with directors such as Soderbergh, Richard Linklater (Bernie), Jeff Nichols (Mud), Lee Daniels (The Paperboy), and William Friedkin (Killer Joe). He exudes McConaughey-ness in the role of Dallas and draws your attention whenever he is on screen, not just because of his shiny washboard abs. There's also a hint of a dark side to his character, someone who isn't above exploiting his employees.

Soderbergh gives everyone a unique look. He takes the nocturnal world of the Tampa club scene and washes it with an orange and yellow glow. During a scene where Mike and Adam attempt to snare a couple girls to their club, Soderbergh shoots it from a high angle long shot where they are just a few bodies in teeming sea of humanity. He then flips it to a closer low angle where the girls are hooked and they are now the only people in the world. Another memorable shot is of Big Dick's namesake appendage being fluffed by a pump, which is in the foreground corner of the screen and slightly out of focus with Adam in the center background staring quizzically at it.

Magic Mike isn't an entirely original story. It's a tried and true cautionary tale of show business with all the requisite dangers of sex, drugs, and backstage drama. But, the cast is superb and Soderbergh gives it his unique stamp.

Rating: *** ½ (*****)

I Don't Know How She Does It

I Don't Know How She Does It - Dir. Douglas McGrath (2011)

Some actors will be forever linked to their most popular roles. That's the case for Arnold and the Terminator, Leonard Nimoy and Spock, or Christopher Reeve and Superman. For Sarah Jessica Parker, it's Carrie Bradshaw. As the glamorous and urbane New Yorker on HBO's Sex and the City, Parker launched her career into the stratosphere. It seems like she's constantly trying to recapture lightning in a bottle by playing variations of Carrie in pictures like Did You Hear About the Morgans?, New Year's Eve, and I Don't Know How She Does It.

In the latter film, Parker is Kate Reddy, a hedge fund manager in Boston, mother of two, and wife to a successful architect named Richard (Greg Kinnear). Kate's life is a delicate balancing act between her professional life and her responsibilities at home. Most of the time, the scales don't tip in the right direction and she misses out on things like her son's first haircut. Kate's maternal duties get pushed further back when her demanding boss (Kelsey Grammer) asks her to land a lucrative account with the phallically appropriate name of Jack Abelhammer (Pierce Brosnan). This new opportunity requires Kate to fly back and forth to New York City and even ditch Thanksgiving dinner for a last minute flight to the Big Apple.

Aside from a crushing schedule, Kate's primary adversaries are a sniveling co-worker (Seth Myers), who is just waiting for her to slip up, and a competitive "momster" (Busy Phillips), who can seemingly outdo everything Kate tries.

I Don't Know How She Does It was based on a best-selling novel by Allison Pearson. It was originally published in 2002 and given the seal of approval by Oprah Winfrey. The Weinstein Company got the rights and went with Aline Brosh McKenna to pen the screenplay. McKenna also adapted the workplace chick-lit comedy, The Devil Wears Prada as well as the similarly themed 27 Dresses and Morning Glory. Luckily, How She Does It isn't another story centered on a type-A working girl whose entire self-worth is based on finding a man. Unfortunately, it is a movie centered on a type-A working girl whose problems aren't a drop in the bucket in the real world.

Pearson's novel was written years before the current recession, which is almost never addressed at all in the film. The one and only reference to the economic crisis is a condescending scene in which Jack and Kate deign to grace the common masses by going bowling in Cleveland. One of the working class stiffs remarks to the former Bond that she'll forgive him for being a banker if he scores a strike. If only it were that easy…

Kate doesn't exactly elicit much sympathy for being a part of the financial sector. She and her husband are also upper middle-class and make a more than comfortable living with a beautiful home. I doubt mothers working three jobs and living in depressed neighborhoods will shed many tears for Kate when her most trying dilemma involves a case of head lice. Or how about the time Kate is forced to masquerade a store-bought pie as homemade for her daughter's bake sale. Oh, the horror.

McKenna and director Douglas McGrath (Emma, Infamous) exacerbate the smugness by intercutting pseudo-documentary interviews with the supporting characters as they emphasize the difficulties modern women face in the workplace. It's an irritating device that adds nothing to an already thin narrative.

If there is anything positive to be found in I Don't Know How She Does It, it is the performances by Christina Hendricks and former G4 hostess Olivia Munn. Hendricks plays Kate's best friend, Allison, a single mother who likely faces far more interesting struggles. Munn is Kate's assistant, Momo, who finds herself pregnant despite the fact that she hates children.

Oprah called the original novel, the "national anthem for working mothers." Something must have been lost in translation since the movie sets the women's movement back twenty years. I Don't Know How She Does It tries to answer a question nobody was asking. The real question is "Why would anyone care?" Not a whole lot of people since the film earned a measly worldwide box office of $30.5 million. Sarah Jessica Parker needs to find more challenging material than How She Does It, a humorless and out of touch comedy full of shrill characters.

Rating: * (*****)

The Slammin' Salmon

The Slammin' Salmon - Dir. Kevin Heffernan (2009)


When it comes to comedy troupes, Broken Lizard probably won’t be mentioned in the same breath as luminaries like Monty Python or the Kids in the Hall. However, they’ve garnered a loyal following thanks to the cult success of their second film, Super Troopers. Since then, Broken Lizard has produced Beerfest and the horror spoof, Club Dread. Neither film was as well received as Super Troopers. The guys are back with the restaurant-themed comedy, The Slammin’ Salmon, which hit a handful of screens at the end of 2009 before going straight to DVD.

The Slammin’ Salmon takes place one night at the trendy Miami restaurant owned by former boxing champion, Cleon Salmon (Michael Clarke Duncan). Salmon is deep in debt with the Yakuza and challenges his maitre d’ Rich Ferente (Kevin Heffernan) to come up with $20,000 before closing. Rich offers up an escalating series of prizes from a free trip to Key Largo to $10,000 for the server who comes up with the biggest take. Unfortunately, the waiter or waitress who comes up with the lowest amount gets a “broken rib sandwich” from the champ.

The wait staff includes Connor (Steve Lemme), who returns to waiting after a failed try at acting; Mia (April Bowlby), a trained ballerina who isn’t afraid to use her sex appeal; Tara (Cobie Smulders), a med student struggling to pay the bills; Guy (Erik Stolhanske), a tanned and obnoxious pretty boy; and the appropriately named Nuts (Jay Chandrasekhar), who transforms into a raging lunatic when he doesn’t take his medication. There are also the twin brothers, Dave and Donnie, both played by Paul Soter. One is the short-tempered head chef; the other is the newly hired busboy.

Many other stars make cameo appearances as the customers. You can watch out for Will Forte, Morgan Fairchild (as herself), Lance Henriksen, Jim Gaffigan, Olivia Munn, Sendhil Ramamurthy from Heroes, Carla Gallo, and Vivica A. Fox. Troupe member Jay Chandrasekhar has handled the directing duties for Broken Lizard’s previous pictures, but hands the reins over to Kevin Heffernan for his directorial debut.

The majority of the film is built around the various interactions between the staff and the patrons. Connor winds up having to wait on his former producer and co-stars. April’s beautiful looks are ruined when she accidentally gets a face full of burning hot soup. Guy is increasingly frustrated with a customer who just sits at his booth reading War and Peace.

Much of the comedy in Slammin’ Salmon falls flat on its face. At best, the gags are slightly amusing. One subplot involves Rich accidentally swallowing an expensive diamond engagement ring which allows us the requisite scatological humor. You just can’t do R-rated comedy without poop jokes. There are also at least three or four instances involving vomiting or implied vomiting.

Most of the acting is rather uneven. Cobie Smulders, who most know from CBS’s How I Met Your Mother, gives one of the better performances. Hers is the most realistic person in a sea of cartoon characters. The star of the film is most definitely Michael Clarke Duncan. The gentle giant of a man has already shown his comedic chops in Talladega Nights as Ricky Bobby’s pit crew chief. Here, Duncan gets a chance to let his improvisational skills shine. He manages to rise above the mundane material, turning Cleon Salmon into the love child of Mike Tyson and Tracy Jordan. Duncan launches into many funny non sequiturs and one-liners like, ”When you assume, you make an asshole out of yourself.”

I don’t count myself as a devotee of Broken Lizard. Though I have many friends who swear by Super Troopers, I personally didn’t get the poor man's version of Police Academy. I haven’t seen any of their other movies so I can’t judge how The Slammin’ Salmon might fit into their pantheon. Broken Lizard followers might find some enjoyment in this otherwise dreary and scattershot comedy.

Rating: *

Date Night

Date Night - Dir. Shawn Levy (2010)


Putting Steve Carell and Tina Fey together seems like an easy way to find comedic gold. With his work on The Daily Show and The Office, Carrell cemented his status as a bankable movie star following the success of The 40-Year Old Virgin. Fey has done the same on Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock. Though she wrote Mean Girls and took a supporting role, she has yet to find a star vehicle worthy of her talents. Date Night is definitely not it.

Carrell and Fey star as Phil and Claire Foster, married with two kids and living in suburban New Jersey. He’s an accountant and she’s a real estate agent. Hoping to shake up their stagnant relationship, the Fosters hope to get a table at a trendy new restaurant in Manhattan. They wind up stealing another couple’s reservations, which becomes a running gag throughout the movie. A case of mistaken identity sends them on the run from a pair of gun-toting thugs (Common and Jimmi Simpson) who are after a flash drive. That’s just the beginning of one crazy night that involves car chases, crooked cops, and mobsters.

Taraji P. Henson co-stars as a sympathetic police detective and Mark Wahlberg appears as a perennially shirtless securities expert. Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig have maybe one scene each as another married couple on the outs. James Franco and Mila Kunis round out the cast as a two low-rent crooks named Taste and Whippit who originally made the reservation. They almost manage to derail the picture into something livelier.

Those of you expecting Date Night to be a Hitchcockian edge of your seat thriller ala The Man Who Knew Too Much must have severe brain damage. The jokes come straight out of a bad 80’s sitcom with some labored slapstick gags thrown in for good measure. Fey and Carrell are never allowed to rise above the bland, cardboard characters they play, despite their best efforts. Date Night’s funniest moments don’t occur during the movie at all, but in the outtakes shown over the end credits. Given the freedom to adlib, they’re able to show off the natural wit that made them stars, coming up with funnier material than what was provided for them.

Rating: *