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This year, there’s no shortage of name recognition on the TFF schedule. I was particularly excited to see J. Blakeson’s The Disappearance of Alice Creed, primarily because of its cast of bankable performers but also because of its intriguing -- if familiar -- premise about a pair of ex-cons who kidnap a rich man’s daughter, only to get entangled in a web of lies and double-crosses before they can cash out.
Unfortunately, I re-learned the hard way that you cannot judge a book by it’s cover. Mr. Blakeson was incredibly lucky to catch Gemma Arterton (Clash Of The Titans, Prince of Persia: The Sand Of Time) and Eddie Marsan (Hancock, Sherlock Holmes) in between super-sized productions, because without performers of their caliber inhabiting two of the three roles in the film, it would’ve completely crumbled as a result of his formulaic and predictable screenplay. It’s not the dialogue that ruins the movie; it’s the forced twists thrown into the narrative that unearth more weaknesses than revelations.
The film begins with a procedural look at Vic (Marsan) and Danny (played with tense insecurity by Martin Compston) as they prepare for the coming kidnapping, meticulously sorting out every detail in cold silence. Blakeson leaves the actual abduction of Alice (the stunning Arterton) to the imagination, probably because the cruelty and horrific nature of the events that follow are traumatic enough to his audience. As we learn more about Vic’s all-too-common plan, the aforementioned twists begin to unfurl, handicapping the suspense by making this heightened cinematic situation a victim of plausible but cheap coincidences. From this point on, The Disappearance of Alice Creed becomes a rather conventional crime thriller; I guessed my way from scene to scene all the way through the end credits.
The film’s victims, in fact, are its most endearing aspect. Though Alice’s broken relationship with her wealthy father serves as the catalyst for Vic an Danny’s actions, don’t assume that she’s just another rich damsel in distress. Arterton gives the character resourcefulness and an inner strength that should be noted by aspiring young actresses. The 24-year-old Brit is a fearless performer who, despite her blockbuster status, shows that she isn’t afraid to get gritty in the harshest of scenarios. With her facial features and body language, she conveys the primal terror that Alice experiences with total sincerity. Even more impressive is Marsan, who is frighteningly fierce as the brains and brawn of an operation that he hopes will provide him enough cash to start a new life. The stakes are high, and he never loses sight of the finish line or breaks from his character’s terrifying persona, even in the face of deceit and defeat.
Though the film’s sharp cinematography and coarse production design will keep you visually engaged, The Disappearance of Alice Creed falls short as a casualty of cliché. It borrows generously from other works within the genre, be it Ron Howard’s Ransom or Rob Reiner’s Misery, and sadly doesn’t give anything in return, making for an awfully average and prescribed moviegoing experience.
Iron Man 2, Jon Favreau’s much-anticipated follow-up to his breakthrough 2008 blockbuster, is less a comic book flick than it is a superhero version of Arthur, the Oscar-nominated 1981 comedy that starred Dudley Moore as a drunken, wise-cracking dilettante. In his second turn as Tony Stark, Robert Downey Jr. recasts the billionaire inventor as the Dean Martin of industrialists, strutting from one star-studded event to another on a bacchanalian victory tour, dishing out choice one-liners and stirring up minor controversies for his exasperated babysitters, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and James "Rhodey" Rhodes (Don Cheadle), to quell. Whether gloating about his achievements at a defense industry expo, upbraiding Senators during a congressional hearing, or getting wasted and donning his armored powersuit to play DJ at his birthday party, there's no telling what kind of madcap mischief Tony Stark will get himself into next!
The Tony Stark Comedy Tour, for what it’s worth, is a supremely entertaining ride (credit screenwriter Justin Theroux at the very least with crafting the genre’s most quotable film of all time), but I’m fairly certain Iron Man 2 is supposed to be an action film, not the Marvel Follies Variety Show. Surely there must be a supervillain lurking in the shadows, a frighteningly powerful menace preparing to unleash its destructive might upon the world?
There is — well, kind of. The primary antagonist of Iron Man 2, Mickey Rourke's hulking Ivan Vanko (aka Whiplash), is certainly a fearsome beast, baring his blinged-out grill and electrified tentacles, but he gets all of five minutes of meaningful screen time in the sequel — hardly enough to establish him as a worthy foe for the great Iron Man. Perhaps producers found Rourke’s chosen dialect, learned from John Malkovich's Rounders School of Exaggerated Russian Accents (“I vant my bort!” he furiously declares when separated from his pet parrot), to be less compelling in post-production.
More likely they became enamored with Sam Rockwell in the role of Justin Hammer, Stark’s resentful business rival and Whiplash’s principal financial backer. It’s certainly understandable. Exuding the hubris and insecurity of a sardonic Mark Cuban (but capable of amusing us with more than just an underachieving basketball team), his performance is easily the best of the film, surpassing even that of the great Downey. (Which makes perfect fodder for conspiracy theorists who wonder why Rockwell was the only member of the main cast not to get his own poster.)
The only problem is, Rockwell’s Hammer is a venture capitalist, not a comic book supervillain, and every second he spends on the screen — as enjoyable as it is — is a second that could have been devoted to dimensionalizing Rourke’s character or crafting a badly-needed action sequence to enliven the talky second act.
It’s little wonder, then, that Stark continues with his feckless, self-destructive ways, unconcerned with the threat posed by the Hammer/Whiplash collaboration. He's got bigger problems to worry about — namely, his inability to find a suitable replacement for palladium, the substance inside the Arc Reactor that powers both his suit and his heart, and which also happens to be slowly killing him.
Thankfully, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. arrive at his compound to stage a kind of intervention, bearing a powerful dual-pronged Deus Ex Machina device that instantly wrests our hero from his para-suicidal stupor — just in time to build the upgraded powersuit he’ll need to thwart the army of powerful robot drones that Whiplash is about to let loose upon on the unsuspecting citizens of Queens, New York. Whew! Favreau steps up the action and delivers a suitably big finish, but don't blink when Iron Man and Whiplash meet on the battlefield, because you might just miss it.
Given that Iron Man 2’s director and writer have both spent the bulk of their movie careers employed as actors, it comes as little surprise that they chose to focus the action on Downey and Rockwell, as the two rank head and shoulders above the rest of the cast. I just wish they found room in between the one-liners for a few more explosions.
Ridley Scott’s plodding, pointless Robin Hood calls to mind a line from a stand-up routine (link NSFW) Patton Oswalt did a few years ago about George Lucas’ limp Star Wars prequels: “I don’t give a s**t where the stuff I love comes from. I just love the stuff I love.” Though there was never any discernible desire among filmgoers to know what the mythical medieval outlaw’s early days were like, Scott nonetheless spent $230 million to tell us.
And so precious little of Robin Hood is devoted to all of the stuff we love about the title character — you know, the stunning displays of archery skill, the robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, etc. Instead, we're forced to watch as the future folk legend, who begins the film as a lowly infantryman in King Richard’s crusading army, engages in significantly less riveting endeavors, like gambling with fellow soldiers in between sieges, arguing against the killing of defenseless Muslims, planting a wheat field just in time for the rainy season, and debating the merits of the Magna Carta (which we learn, through Scott’s usage of lame repressed-memory flashbacks, that his father actually wrote).
Needless to say, this isn’t Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood (which, say what you will, was at least entertaining), but a gritty, period-authentic, “real” take on the character, absent all the usual Hollywood gloss and polish. Scott’s faux-revisionist approach calls for copious hand-held camera work, a subdued color palette, and various other cinematic devices (but no blood — this is PG-13, after all) meant to properly depict the nasty and brutish reality of existence in the early 13th century. Dirt and grime are omnipresent, and all of the actors appear as if they haven’t bathed or shaved for days. Poor Cate Blanchett, usually radiant even when dressed down, looks positively ghastly as old Maid Marion.
For the lead role, naturally, Scott tabbed his trusty pal Russell Crowe, the very embodiment of modern actorly grit, who in Robin Hood perpetually bears the weathered sneer of a man awakened too early after a roaring bender. His principal adversary is not the Sheriff of Nottingham, whose role is reduced to that of comic relief, but Godfrey (Mark Strong), a scheming, Rasputin-like advisor to the throne of England who secretly conspires to aid her greatest enemy, France.
Unfortunately, Robin and Godfrey share almost no screen time together, draining much of the potential weight from their conflict. Their rivalry is mainly played out by proxy, with a former royal functionary (William Hurt, looking as lost and confused as we are) acting as a go-between while our Robin labors vainly to imbue a semblance of believability to his hasty courtship of recently-widowed Marion. His effort, among other things, involves an audacious narrative switcheroo reminiscent — I s**t you not — of this scene from the 2006 comedy Beerfest.
It goes without saying that drawing comparisons to a movie called Beerfest does not bode well for a serious-minded period epic. If there’s a silver lining to be drawn from Robin Hood, it’s that the filmmakers mercifully chose not to release a 3D version of the film, indicating that there was at least one kind soul at Universal Pictures who couldn’t bear the thought of some poor sap paying $19 to watch this medieval monstrosity.
Hollywood has always been an insular place, its peculiar rhythms largely indifferent to those of the outside world. Nowhere is this more achingly evident than in Sex and the City 2, a movie so staggeringly tone-deaf it appears as if constructed in some decadent biosphere, its filmmakers unaware that they were constructing not only one of the worst studio films in recent memory, but arguably one the most misogynist as well.
Whereas the close of 2008’s Sex and the City found heroines Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristen Davis), and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) more or less getting everything they’ve ever wanted, the sequel finds them faced with the inconveniences that come along with having everything they’ve ever wanted. Patrician Charlotte, despite the aid of both of a full-time nanny and a housekeeper, is overwhelmed by the demands of being a stay-at-home mom to two children, while high-powered executive Miranda is too ensconced in boardroom politics to attend her genius second-grader’s science faire (though, to be honest, the child is probably better off without her around).
Superstar publicist Samantha, now 52, her familiar bawdiness nearing its awkward, creepy-uncle stage, is in the throes of peri-menopause, swallowing pills by the handful to boost her sex drive and forestall her inevitable descent into cat-hoarding spinsterdom. And Carrie, two years into her marriage with Mr. Big (Chris Noth), a man whose positive qualities are limited to his massive bank account and his supply of clever entendres (each delivered in his trademark dulcet monotone), is frustrated that her husband is more interested in spending weeknights watching TV on the couch than squiring his prized thoroughbred around to glitzy movie premieres.
Wilting under such stifling affluence, the four gal pals opt to flee on a whirlwind trip to the Abu Dhabi to recharge their collective engines — but not before a nearly hour-long first act involving a gay wedding, which allows writer/director/producer Michael Patrick King to get his fill of gay jokes and throw in a superfluous performance of Liza Minnelli singing Beyonce’s All the Single Ladies. And it’s just as disturbing as you'd expect.
The choice of Abu Dhabi as the girls’ destination is not as counter-intuitive as it seems: The famously oil-rich Arab Emirate is one of the few places on earth capable of providing the girls with a level of luxury beyond which they’ve already grown accustomed. Justice (and compelling storytelling) would find their plane hijacked and re-routed to Mogadishu, where they’d be forced into the employ of Somali pirates. But no, they land safely in Abu Dhabi, where they’re given individual Maybachs, a throng of dutiful manservants, and a $22,000/night hotel suite — all the accoutrements required to gain the proper perspective on things.
By this point, King has clearly lost his perspective, unaware of how monstrously self-absorbed and entitled he's allowed his film's four protagonists to become, or how their unapologetic opulence might appear to a world still struggling to emerge from economic armageddon. He's too preoccupied with mounting his female version of Ishtar — replete with awful puns involving camel toes and "Lawrence of my labia" and an atrocious karaoke performance of the feminist anthem "I Am Woman, Here Me Roar" — to notice how badly things have gone awry, and how badly his film reflects upon women.
And it gets worse. Before leaving Abu Dhabi, the increasingly loathsome quartet become involved in a mishap that ends with Samantha (now effectively reduced to a walking hormone joke) in the middle of a busy town square, holding up a package of condoms, thrusting her hips and shouting, "I have sex!!!" as the Muslim call to prayer is sounded. Sex and the City 2 won't win any awards (save for a few Razzies), but it could become an effective inspirational video for suicide bombers — provided they can endure the film's two-and-a-half hour running time, of course.
