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| ©Warner Bros. |
Finn (Matthew McConaughey) and Tess (Kate Hudson) are getting divorced. Finn misses the hearing because he's just sunk his boat while treasure-hunting, and the rapper/entrepreneur/criminal Bigg Bunny (Kevin Hart), who fronted him the money for the boat, tried to have him killed. By the time Finn gets to the courthouse, it's too late. He's divorced, and Tess got everything.
Not one to let things rest, Finn manages to do a favour for the daughter of the billionaire (Donald Sutherland) Tess now works for. In the process, he has to be rescued, and ends up on the billionaire's yacht, where he regales the man with stories of the vast Spanish treasure he is on the verge of locating. The billionaire is interested, and has nothing much to do anyway, so he goes treasure-hunting with Finn. Hey, if you can believe that Tess and Finn can casually walk into the Spanish archives and be allowed to peruse the 17th-Century documents -- which they can read like they were printed in English, with pictures -- unattended, so they can discover the clue that no one else has spotted in nearly 400 years and then make out, then you can believe the rest of this plot. Anyway, it's a frothy little romantic comedy and you don't care about any of that factual stuff. And it's more believable than what you hear at any White House briefing these days.
And you really don't care about the many obvious holes in the plot, you just sit back and enjoy letting it roll by. Kevin Hart is a wonderful little villain, and his henchmen (played by Malcolm Jamal Warner and Brian Hooks) are nicely-done comic relief. The entire movie is a farce, and if you like seeing competent fit actors and actresses in skimpy clothes wandering through lush tropical scenery (Australia, standing in for the Caribbean), then this movie's not nearly as bad as you'd expect it to be from the ratings and reviews.
If you were alive during World War II and spent much time watching picture shows, you could be forgiven for thinking that everyone in the US Army was from the poor areas of New York and spoke with adenoidal voice in staccato dialect, spouting lines that seem superficially clever. That was the style at the time, and Lord! does it seem tired and dated now. Luckily, in this film, the two female leads are characters from Iowa and Germany, so they sound different.
Jean Arthur plays Phoebe Frost, a Republican congresswoman from the corniest part of Iowa; she is part of a fact-finding junket to look into the morale of US servicemen occupying Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war. (The film came out in 1948, but hints in the dialogue indicate that it's set in 1946, when things were most desperate for German survivors. A lot of newsreel footage was used to show the extent of destruction, and much of the outdoor filming was done on location in the ruined Nazi capital. It helps provoke understanding, but not sympathy.)
Ms Frost is determined not to be hornswoggled by the dog-and-pony show the Army routinely trots out for visiting dignitaries. While on a tour of the devastation, she turns her eye to the behaviour she sees from servicemen on the side of the road, and is horrified to find fraternization between soldiers and Germans, especially women. She is shocked. Her conservative morals are outraged. She leaves the congressional group,* disappearing with two soldiers who mistake her for a fraulein, and ends up at a night club where Erika von Schlütow (Marlene Dietrich) performs. Determined to investigate rumours that von Schlütow had dealings with high-level Nazis during the war, she contacts Captain Pringle (John Lund), who is also from Iowa and whom she met when she first arrived. Pringle is a man of ordinary scruples, not averse to trading a birthday cake for a mattress on the black market. Frost enlists Pringle's aid in tracking down von Schlütow, not realizing that Pringle himself is von Schlütow's American lover. He successfully sidetracks Frost, pretending to be romantically interested in her. She is such an empty-headed bimbo that she falls for it completely, and makes a fool of herself.
Captain Pringle, and his commanding officer, Colonel Plummer (Millard Mitchell) get to make some rousing speeches appealing to patriotism and justifying the Army's pragmatic approach to the occupation and the tasks it entails. Frost is too doltish to understand the relative importance of things, until she gets swept up in a raid -- provoked by her own criticisms of what goes on in such places -- of the night club where she was getting thoroughly drunk with Captain Pringle until he was summoned back to base. She ends up in von Schlütow's debt for getting her released without publicity. At the end of the movie, Frost seems to have become aware of the limitations of her knee-jerk moral views, though it's not at all clear that she truly understands anything about the motivations of the people around her, either the Germans or the Americans.
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| ©Sony Pictures Classics |
Today is Saturday; I watched this movie on Thursday morning, and have been trying to think of something concise and witty to say about it. As you will soon know, I've given up on that and will instead be garrulous and dull.
Part of the problem is that this movie stars Jennifer Anniston as one of the four female leads. I have a thing for her (like I'm the only one), and it's hard to see her as anything but Rachel Green on Friends, and to wonder why she will waste her time with that loser Ross. (I was so hoping that she'd take up with "Mark" at Ralph Lauren, but no....) It's not like Anniston has never played anything but weak-willed whiny Princesses who only slowly grow a spine; this might be the only time since Friends ended that she's taken a similar part. But she is so closely identified with the Rachel character in my mind that, no matter what character she plays, it takes me a while to not see Rachel. Anniston is an excellent and accomplished actor, with a range that often surprises fans like me. In this case, though, the character she plays seems like her stepping back into that Rachel role, and in fact into the worst of it, made still worse by her relationship with a male character, Mike (played with oily loucheness by Scott Caan), who makes Ross look good.
Anniston plays Olivia, one of a group of four women who formed their friendships in school, but are now all grown up and on different trajectories. Olivia, once a teacher, is now cleaning houses while she searches for a vocation. (Spoiler alert: she doesn't find one, she just moves on to another easy option that, had the movie gone on with the story, would almost certainly turn out to be another temporary fix.)
Frances McDormand plays Jane, a successful (but not famous) fashion designer going through, I guess, pre-menopause? Is that a real thing? Anyway, she's getting bitchy and grumpy and everyone in her life seems to think it's out of character for her. I identify with her, as she and I share a love of complaining about every little thing. Unlike me, though, she has actually arrived at the point of going out in public without attending to basic personal hygiene, whereas I can only fantasize about it.
Catherine Keener plays Christine, a screenwriter. She and her husband sit at a partner's desk and write together, but lately something has changed between them; the dialogue he suggests has taken on an edge, and finally things blow up between them and he leaves. I don't recall ever having the reason for it explained, but he is clearly reacting to some change in her: he's grown tired of whatever it is, and feels increasingly exasperated. It may be because she only hears what she wants to hear, as when, despite the conversation the couple had with the architect at the start of the movie, she is surprised to find the neighbours are upset about the second floor they're adding to their house because it blocks everyone else's view of the ocean. He is further exasperated by her spur-of-the-moment unilateral decision to suddenly stop the construction and send the work crew away after the damage is done. She, in turn, is angered by his new-found lack of concern for her. Later, when she stubs her toe and the nanny calls out to ask if she's okay -- something her husband failed to do in the middle of a fight -- she believes she's made a right decision in separating.
And Joan Cusack plays Franny, a trust-fund baby. She seems content with her life of personal trainers making house calls, and household staff, a happy marriage and no problems to speak of. She's the one who sets Olivia up with the sleazebag Mike. She thinks maybe her husband spends too much but it's not really a problem. She is the least developed of the four main characters, probably because there's nothing wacky about her. Despite her financial comfort, she's just an ordinary person leading a comfortable life.
The men in this movie are less developed. We never learn what provoked Christine's husband, or why Franny's husband might be spending too much, but we can imagine answers to these things. More interesting is the slightly fuller treatment given to Jane's husband Aaron, whom Simon McBurney deftly plays as one of those Is-He-Or-Isn't-He guys: everyone thinks he might be gay. (I'm resisting the urge to contrast his character with the title role in Frasier.) To me, he points up the difficulty we grown men have in forming friendships that don't depend on support for the local NFL or NBA team, or on an indulgence in huntin' and fishin' between lap dances.
This is a good film. It entertains while telling an engaging story about people we can care about, to some degree. There is some superficiality about it; maybe if there were only three main characters instead of four, there would be time to explore them more fully. But who to leave out? Olivia is the main focus of the group; Jane is the most interesting; Christine is the one whose life is most affected; and Franny is the catalyst for the group, without whom nothing much, really, would happen.
This was writer/director Nicole Holofcener's third feature-length movie. Reading through the list of her films on Wikipedia tells me they all seem to deal with adult relationships, and that Holofcener has excellent rapport with her actors. When respected serious actors sign up to do films with a director over and over, it's a good indication that the resulting film will be worth watching. (Or it means the paycheck is really huge. But Holofcener does independent films.) It makes me wish I didn't live in a cinematic backwater where only franchise blockbusters make it to the theaters; the only other movie on the list that I've seen is Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which Holofcener co-wrote but didn't direct; I saw it in a theater and enjoyed it enough to remember it. I'm thinking I should take that list to the library and see if I can get enough of her work to have a Holofcener Film Festival. What little I've seen so far makes me think it'd be a good way to spend a couple of days, especially if it's rainy and my wife is home.
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You don't see too many Russian films in public library collections in flyover-country. This one may show why; but if you can get past the poor English dubbing, the disruptive Chinese translation audio, the cartoonish characterizations, the odd cinematic palette and the less-than-state-of-the-art special cinematic effects, you might be entertained.
The film tells a story that would be familiar to most Russian schoolchildren: in the early 13th Century, the Mongol empire is sweeping across an unformed Russian country. From the struggle, a folk hero named Evpaty arises. (According to the film -- I don't know the story otherwise -- he's nicknamed Kolovrat ("spinning wheel") for the way he fights with two swords.) He tries to get the various Russian city-states of the era to unite, and meanwhile takes on the invading Horde in delaying actions. He does well enough to earn the Mongol Khan's respect. It's a hagiographic national-origin story, and if I'd been raised with Russian cinema I might consider it a good movie; but I wasn't, and so the technical faults I listed above keep it from being much more than an easily-dismissed second-rate martial arts genre film.
Actually, to be fair, I can -- and did -- overlook the palette, which seems unduly saturated, and the dubbing, which is pretty much unavoidable; people in non-English speaking countries deal with it almost every time they go to a picture show, but we Americans are unused to it. Most of my friends won't even consider watching a movie with subtitles, let alone a film dubbed into English.
I can overlook the characters' lack of depth and development, given that this is a dramatization of national legend and it's fair for the filmmakers to be able to assume the audience already has some familiarity with the subject. It'd be like us watching an action movie about the Civil War: we should already know who Grant and Lee are.
I can overlook the derisive treatment of the Mongols; they are simpletons, and their leader, the Great Khan, seems to have stepped out of a colourful Ridley Scott version of Flash Gordon. I don't care.
I can overlook the corner-cutting, as when it becomes clear that a gigantic log used to take out some of the invaders is actually made of papier maché and weighs only a few pounds, like those rocks the aliens throw on the original Star Trek series.
I can overlook the simplistic treatment of Kolovrat's relationships -- they're only important to the story insofar as they show that he had relationships.
What I can't overlook, though, is the aggravatingly intrusive A.I.-generated audio translations of whatever language the Mongol invaders are speaking in the film. The translation is given in a mechanical-sounding Chinese-accented female voice that sounds like it's running at 150% of normal speed. It is horrible and detracts utterly from the movie, so much that every good thing about the film is ruined. Surely even the Russian market would reject overdubbing of that poor quality.
This is actually the end of the Fourth Annual Havasu Film Festival. I still have a plastic bag stuffed with DVDs I'd intended to watch, but my wife's coming home soon and I am, relatively speaking, suddenly lacking in interest sufficient to pursue further viewing.
