The Interrupters (2011)

The Interrupters (2011)
Dir. Steve James

4.5 out of 5

There's a fact dropped very casually at the beginning of The Interrupters, from the voice of an unseen news anchor, that the annual number of murder victims in Chicago has surpassed the annual number of American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. "War zone" is often a reductive way of describing America's most beleaguered urban communities, but it almost fits the South Side neighborhoods examined by accomplished documentarian Steve James (Hoop Dreams). Into the breach step the members of CeaseFire, the specialized "violence interrupters" that give the film its title. Putting themselves in harm's way on a daily basis, they embody what the government and many of their neighbors seem unable or unwilling to comprehend - sacrifice.

Of course, to the three interrupters profiled by James over the course of a year, sacrifice is as familiar as a brother or sister. All of them carry the burden of a past that involves gang membership, or drug dealing, or unspeakable acts of violence. CeaseFire allows them to turn this burden into a tool for change. The organization is built on the theory that the spread of violence exhibits a pattern similar to that of an infectious disease. The interrupters are the patient zeroes of a potential cure, individuals who found a way within themselves to inhibit the causes of violent behavior and who struggle to translate it for a world that enables the whims of the slighted and the vengeful. Hope is a powerful motivator, but so is guilt. The film's often-glimpsed subtext is how violence intervention is as effective in building up the interrupter as it is in assuaging the interrupted.

The Interrupters is not as bleak as you might imagine. There is great affirmation in the relationships built between the film's main subjects and the people who need their help. One mediator, a tough-as-nails activist, mother, and progeny of noted Chicago crime lord Jeff Fort, is pushed to her limits by a teenage girl who alternates between red-hot aggression and heartbreaking vulnerability. Another copes with his gangbanging past by reaching out to elementary school children - those who were born witness to a world of violence, and who are on the cusp of entering it themselves - with art therapy. He desperately wants to apologize directly to the families of those he has hurt, but fears their potential reaction. How proud he would be to see CeaseFire's influence reflected in a 17-year-old boy who does just that to his past robbery victims, standing humbled against their torrent of justifiable anguish.

Though it's ultimately affirming, The Interrupters is also exhausting. James offers plenty of telling details about how such an epidemic goes unrecognized in an era of 24-hour news coverage. He captures some of the media furor that ensues when the murder of Derrion Albert is captured on cameraphones and goes viral. For a few days, an indignant nation watches as government officials pledge anew to stop the violence in Chicago. (Several months later, some misguided souls in the Illinois legislature suggest deploying the National Guard in Chicago as a sinecure. An emotionally-charged community meeting quashes that boneheaded idea.) But neither James nor the interrupters are naive enough to expect that this will be a turning point. They, like the film, are dedicated to the long haul. The Interrupters does right by its subjects by pulling them into the limelight, even if they are all too aware that they'll quickly fade back into the shadows. It's a massively overwhelming job, but it's necessary and effective. As one client theorizes, an interrupter is like a fly that keeps landing on his face while he tries to nap. You can try to ignore it, he says, "but eventually you got to tend to that fly."

Young Sherlock Holmes (1985)

Young Sherlock Holmes (1985)
Dir. Barry Levinson

2.5 out of 5

Alarmingly stern titles bookend the otherwise lightweight Young Sherlock Holmes, reminding us that the film is taking considerable liberties with the printed canon of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - an "affectionate speculation" that wonders what it would have been like if Holmes and John Watson had met as schoolboys. They're weird bits of legalese and sycophancy that contradict the more fantastical aspects of the movie and made me wonder if I was seeing a bowdlerized version of what was once a much wilder and imaginative idea.

That said, Young Sherlock Holmes is already plenty weird, yet rarely feels more substantive than a typical kiddie mystery goosed by staccato action sequences that blend puppetry, animatronics, and nascent computer-generated effects. (Holmes is famous as the first film to use a fully CGI effect, a stained-glass knight that comes to life and menaces a priest for approximately 10 seconds. It was created by Pixar, back when the company was a branch of George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic.) Narrated by an aged Watson - portrayed in his youth by Alan Cox, looking for all the world like a boy dressed as an accountant for Halloween - the movie tracks the development of the teenage Holmes (Nicholas Rowe) and his uncanny gift for deduction. After some very Encyclopedia Brown-style hijinks, Rowe catches his first adult case when he suspects that an Egyptian death cult is responsible for the murders of several wizened London educators. The blatant similarities to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, released just a year prior, would seem highly transgressive were Holmes not produced and "presented" by Steven Spielberg himself.

The young cast acquits itself well, even if it doesn't have the best material. Cox is amusing as history's frumpiest 13-year-old, standing a foot and a half shorter than Rowe and acting as his intellectual punching bag. Rowe does even better work as Cox's fellow outcast, a playfully precocious savant who's nonetheless an arrogant prick - an intriguing prologue for a character as famously frigid as the great detective. The film even dares to give Rowe a love interest, Elizabeth (Sophie Ward), who lends him pathos in ways that are, if not the most original, strangely affecting. Unfortunately, we don't learn much more about them once the investigation gets under way and Levinson - an odd choice to direct - fixates on the sequences designed to show off all the expensive effects and stunt work.

I don't want to discount the work of the technical professionals. It is very good for the genre and the era, and carries some of the dated charm of the horrors from the Nightmare on Elm Street series. (The 'animatronics supervisor' is Stephen Norrington, who would go on to direct similarly speculative Victorian mayhem in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.) But technical wizardry is not an effective substitute for a compelling narrative. The script, penned by Chris Columbus, has a certain moppets-solving-mysteries vibe later glimpsed in his Harry Potter adaptations but can't sustain the appropriate level of wonder, much less excitement. Though a stellar deliverer of endearingly quirky, low-octane thrills (and perhaps pre-pubescent nightmares), Young Sherlock Holmes is a disappointingly grounded work of speculative fiction. In fretting over its potential to upset hardcore fans or tarnish a legacy, the film largely fails to create either of its own.

Hall Pass (2011)

Hall Pass (2011)
Dir. Bobby and Peter Farrelly

2 out of 5

Purveyors of comic scatology and sentimentality alike, the Farrelly Brothers haven't changed much since their feature debut seventeen(!) years ago. Hall Pass is the latest reminder that, in a post-Apatow world, it's just not enough to string together poop jokes and cringe-inducing slapstick and call it a comedy. The film seems to exist in a vacuum where Epic/Date/Disaster Movie never happened.

But before I make a comparison that I'll regret, I should point out that Hall Pass makes an attempt at a coherent narrative: two married men with wandering eyes (Owen Wilson; Jason Sudekis) are given permission - for reasons involving the dubious advice of Joy Behar¹ - by their wives (Jenna Fischer; Christina Applegate) to take a one-week vacation from their marriages. The idea is that, softened by domesticity, Sudekis and Wilson will be utterly embarrassed in attempting to sow their wild oats.² And while they are predictably inept when it comes to carousing - their first idea of a hot pickup spot is Applebee's - they are undaunted. Really, they can't afford to be. One week isn't a particularly long time.

It does, however, feel like an eternity when the movie so eagerly scrapes the bottom of the comedy barrel and gropes for laughs with a script that was probably once a thesis titled "Men Are This, But Women Are Like This." The problems are compounded by the Farrellys' puzzling inclusion of several non-sequitur gags and scenes that tax the audience's tolerance for poorly-conceived crudity. A good dirty joke is emphatic and purposeful, but Hall Pass prefers to scatter them about in the most discomforting fashion. Even scenes that exist for the simplest purposes, like bringing together Wilson and his potential conquest, an attractive Australian barista (Nicky Whelan), at the gym veer in desperate and unflattering directions.

Of course, Hall Pass never strays too far from the notion that Wilson and Sudekis are just goofy, harmless guys who, unlike their lothario friend (a baffling Richard Jenkins), have no idea what to do with their temporary sexual permissiveness. The result is affable boredom, characterized best in the casting of Wilson and Fischer as a married couple. They regard each other across a gulf of mutual vacancy. Sudekis fares better, much more believable as a horndog here than in Horrible Bosses, simply because the Farrellys refuse him much dignity. But, if the wildly devolved approach on display in Hall Pass is any indication, they should have saved some for themselves.

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1 Behar’s performance is distractingly awkward, like she is fighting the impulse to look directly into the camera. She is summarily out-acted by everyone in the film, including extras and former Boston Red Sox outfielder Dwight Evans.

2 Because who needs stupid counseling when you can release your husbands into the loving embrace of adultery?

Bellflower (2011)

Bellflower (2011)
Dir. Evan Glodell

2.5 out of 5

Bellflower, the only film I know of that beings with an epigraph from The Road Warrior, is a curiously homegrown creation of great mystery, great ambition, and great disappointment. It's something ramshackle and hideous and alive, and it doesn't get that way for a good forty-five minutes into the film. In extended preamble, it's a lo-fi indie romance about shy tinkerer Woodrow (Evan Glodell, who also wrote, directed, and custom-built the cameras that were used to shoot the film) and his doomed fixation on the hard-nosed, free-spirited Milly (Jessie Wiseman). Theirs is not a classic courtship. They meet in a lusciously-filmed cricket eating contest. Soon enough Glodell indirectly asks Wiseman to be his girlfriend. She is less than enthused, claiming that she'll hurt Glodell, who moons over her anyway. I'll admit that this is a groan-enducer. But it becomes very important. You can't say she didn't warn him.

Glodell also happens to be obsessed with custom-built machines of great violence and little practicality. He and best friend Aiden (Tyler Dawson) pine for the post-apocalyptic wasteland suggested by George Miller's Mad Max trilogy, specifically the fearsome Lord Humungus, leader of a marauding gang of auto pirates who rumble across the country in modified combat-ready muscle cars and motorbikes. This is their inspiration for 'Mother Medusa' - their own flame-spewing renegade ride. They are convinced the world is creeping ever closer to indulging the prophecies embedded in 1980s Australian sci-fi cinema. As you might expect, they are not the most well-adjusted of men, and woefully unequipped to handle real-life disaster.

Bellflower takes a while to get going, then becomes enamored with a near-constant distortion of the movie's timeline. The non-linear portions are the most noteworthy, but also the most irritating, as if Glodell can't do a good enough patch job to cover for the large swaths of less interesting narrative. What is fascinating is how Bellflower uses its temporal distortion and suspension of logic to suggest Glodell's long, steep slide into a personal Hell. The apocalypse has come to him at last, just in the form of problems that can't all be solved with flamethrowers. Not that Glodell doesn't try. Unfortunately, he only succeeds in proving correct that old axiom about fighting fire with fire.

A few more things to note. First, the disjointed structure makes Bellflower seem twice as long as it actually is. This doesn't affect the movie in any perceptible way, except to recommend that you don't watch it at the end of an especially long and taxing day. Second, alcohol (and by extension, alcoholism) is a primary yet largely ignored agent in the film. Glodell and Dawson imbibe spirits the way others do caffeine. This could be very revealing in terms of character and intent, or it could mean that the actors like to get a good buzz going. Third, Dawson emerges as the mostly unsung hero of the film. While Glodell broods and rages and gets in all kinds of stupid trouble, Dawson gets shit done. He is the only one doing anything to combat the moral decay and death wish of his fellow castmates, yet I'm not sure if this is what Bellflower intends for us to see in him. In one breath, he encourages the gradual awakening of Glodell's adult self. In the next, he still seems pretty serious about all this Road Warrior stuff. Alas, Bellflower is never as arresting as when it turns, however sporadically, an accusatory eye at the ugliness that permeates its world. For a film with such Biblical overtures, it certainly loves the sinner yet is oddly reluctant to hate the sin.

Fright Night (2011)

Fright Night (2011)
Dir. Craig Gillespie

3.5 out of 5

Evil is afoot in the Las Vegas suburbs of Fright Night, where teenage social climber Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) imprudently rejects the supposition posed by his geeky estranged friend (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) that his intense next door neighbor, Jerry (Colin Farrell), is not a human but a full-fledged creature of the night. As Yelchin uncovers Farrell's true identity (with some unfortunate consequences for Mintz-Plasse; no good deed goes unpunished), he turns to magician and self-proclaimed vampire expert Peter Vincent (David Tennant) for his help in vanquishing the monster hiding in plain sight.

Here's the rub: compared to the conventions of current vamp media, Farrell is a vicious throwback to the days when vampires were mostly interested in humans as a source of food, not as sources of sympathy and understanding. He's essentially a superpowered, amoral eating machine. Mintz-Plasse aptly compares him to "the shark from Jaws." So praise be to Fright Night for reviving the venal, irredeemable creature that lives to scare the shit out of us. Even when he's not (unconvincingly) pretending to be living flesh, Farrell gives a memorable performance that's several dozen degrees off center. He's a rather obvious villain, but one so cunning and creepily mannered that he projects a real and constant menace.

Fright Night definitely needs all the unpredictability that Farrell brings, as it's nearly squandered when the film veers in his direction far too quickly. The script was penned by Marti Noxon, a veteran of TV's Buffy and Angel, which may explain its arrhythmic pacing and textbook stalling tactics. Though the rapidly escalating conflict gives us a few nifty scenes, it also threatens to turn the movie into a banal exercise in horror movie endurance (let's just say that people still haven't learned not to go upstairs when cornered). But what Noxon lacks in structure she makes up for in witty, quotable dialogue. She has a perfect mouthpiece in the dryly exasperated Tennant, who reinvigorates the film when he wrests it away from Farrell in the third act.

Fright Night is presented in 3D, but it shouldn't be. The audience must endure a bombardment of hokey visual gags, an annoyance compounded by the generally poor quality of the movie's CGI (it draws very unkind G.I. Joe comparisons). Thankfully, the story and performances are sturdy enough to stand on their own. The same goes for the film as a remake (though I confess that I haven't seen the 1985 original), a bloody fun time at the movies and a nasty rejoinder to all those who would try to defang Dracula's descendants.

Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011)

Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011)
Dir. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa

3 out of 5

Crazy, Stupid, Love is a star-driven romantic comedy that prefers its passion served up coy and genteel. You know how some films seem hell-bent on breaking the record for utterances of the F-word? This one has a similar goal in mind, except with the euphemism "sleep with." Sex is the love that dare not speak its name. For all of Love's obsession with soulmates and overwhelming romantic desires, you wonder why these poor people just can't say what's on their minds.

That's a minor complaint. Most of Love is thoroughly enjoyable, well-acted, and nice to look at. It tells the story of Cal (Steve Carell) and Emily Weaver (Julianne Moore) and their divorce. It is a shock to the family's system, particularly to the couple's grandiose and lovesick son (Jonah Bobo) who's harboring a crush on his babysitter (Analeigh Tipton), and who cannot accept this crack in his platonic ideal of a loving relationship. Yet, it's Carell who is the most broken, turning to the resident womanizer at a local bar (Ryan Gosling) for advice in sowing his wild oats post hoc.

Love subscribes to a brand of cathartic comedy that squeezes awkward, knowing laughs from the pain of a broken home and the broken hearts that come with it. The approach works thanks to last piece of the puzzle, a down-to-earth dreamgirl (Emma Stone) who manages to puncture Gosling's machismo. The film smartly utilizes Stone's status as a audience darling to throw jabs at the transform-your-man romantic formula, even as the script asks us to acquiesce to these very familiar characters and themes. Sometimes a little tweaking is all it takes. Stone's evisceration of Gosling's strategies for sealing the deal (as well as the Brookstone-meets-Wynn Hotels eyesore of his bachelor pad) is what sticks in the mind. The fact that she then chooses to be with him is secondary and still somewhat satisfying.

In Love, the concept of love itself is limited to the opposite ends of a match - you get either the spark or fizzle and none of the slow burn in between. Perhaps this is because the movie has a lot of unnecessary ground to cover. It lingers too lovingly on Gosling's alpha male dominance before (partially) knocking him off his pedestal, and the babysitter arc quickly slides into child services territory. They're hyper-mature "kids" that don't really act their age (as kids in movies are wont to do); nonetheless I kept wondering if I should call the cops. But what's a little bit of narrative bloat in a movie that calls itself on its own bullshit while it endearingly sticks to its core principles? Love is ultimately a welcome confection, genuinely surprising and comfortably familiar in its way.

Senna (2011)

Senna (2011)

Dir. Asif Kapadia

4.5 out of 5

Senna, a moving biography of the late Formula One driving star Ayrton Senna, is a stunning exercise in cinematic immersion. There is no primer on F1 racing and its massive popularity in the rest of the world (besides soccer, no other sport surpasses it). Montages seem to be regarded as redundancies. The film completely eschews talking heads. It's more of an audiovisual scrapbook than a conventional interviews-and-infographics documentary. This makes for some bumpy first impressions, but it pays off in spades by the end of the film. Senna builds its momentum by ignoring convention and still manages to deliver a timeless story about the making of a legend, feeding off the rambunctious energy and passion of its subject.

Though the Brazilian driver's career was relatively brief, director Asif Kapadia doesn't lack for great material, skillfully juxtaposing Senna the phenomenon with Senna the man. Here was an athlete whose genius was as daring as it was reckless, though not without a sense of mortality (auto racing is, after all, one of only three pursuits that Hemingway lauded as "real" sports due to the participants' constant proximity to death). A devout Catholic, Senna frequently invokes the divine to describe the sublime joy and fear of whipping a kayak on wheels around hairpin turns at 150 miles per hour. The first half of the film details how this approach soured his relationship with some of F1's biggest power brokers, including champion driver Alain Prost - who, as it happened, would become Senna's teammate for two tumultuous seasons in the late 1980s.

The Prost-Senna rivalry is but the incubator of an eventful career peppered with incidents that carry more than a whiff of conspiracy, illuminated by some incredibly damning footage. In one breathtaking pre-race sequence, Senna leads his jumpsuited colleagues in lobbying his other great professional nemesis, former F1 president Jean-Marie Balestre, in making changes to improve the safety of a German grand prix course. The look of satisfaction on Senna's face reveals so much. No secondhand account of this story could ever match watching the drama unfold in real time.

Some eyebrows might rise at the whitewashing of Senna's mercenary tendency to jump to whichever team occupied F1's financial and technological apex, especially when the film goes to lengths establishing Senna as the antithesis of the less-skilled driver made great by his team owner's deep pockets. Kapadia also engages in clunky hero-worship here and there, but it's discomfiting inasmuch as it is completely unnecessary. There's plenty in the film already that would support Senna as a highly sympathetic figure. But then Senna is something of a legacy project that remembers the great sportsman as something more a bright light that burned out all too quickly. It's only fair. People seemed to dislike Senna simply because he refused to give anything less than his best, even as he blew away his competition. Senna does him a great service by boldly stating its case to join the rarefied company of the best sports documentaries ever made.