It’s been six years since filmmaker Guy Ritchie teamed up with Madonna to make the apocalyptically bad Swept Away. In the interim, the couple has been quietly licking their wounds: Ritchie has directed a pair of nondescript actioners while his soon-to-be ex made a pointless appearance in Die Another Day. Aside from that, zippo.
Now, as fate would have it, each is releasing a directorial effort within weeks of their divorce filing. And what would appear to be an even battle of hack vs. hack is actually a slight victory for the neophyte director – with the old pro emerging as a true chump.
The bad news for Ritchie is that his offering, RocknRolla is even worse than its title, and this time, he can’t pin the blame on his wife.
Like all of Ritchie’s other pictures, RocknRolla seems to have been cobbled together after a cocaine-fueled Tarantino festival. Ritchie is again trying to one-up his idol by multiplying the plots of Pulp Fiction by a factor of four, while replicating Tarantino’s hothouse dialogue and sitcom gangsters.
The dozen-or-so stories in RocknRolla are impossible to summarize; they zigzag and cross-pollinate until the picture collapses into indecipherable goo. Narcotics are smoked, threats are made and alliances are broken, and each narrative ends with underworld toughs pummeling each other while implying (and sometimes admitting) their homosexual tendencies.
After a while, the movie seems less mindless thriller than personal psychodrama, with Ritchie openly questioning his own sexual orientation by dramatizing his characters’ gay panic. And if that isn’t grounds for divorce, I don’t know what is.
While Ritchie was frittering away what was left of his credibility, Madonna was working on her unpleasant, though competent, debut feature Filth and Wisdom.
A collaboration with novice writer Dan Cadan (who worked in various capacities on Ritchie’s last few films), Wisdom is Madonna’s wobbly collection of life lessons earned throughout a lifetime of self-promoting sexuality.
A.K. (Eugene Hutz) is the central character, a Ukrainian rocker who has surrounded himself with a coterie of amoral drifters. A.K. is meant to be our guide through a shocking, deviant world – his friends’ lives depend on drugs and/or degradation – but it’s impossible to take him seriously; he exists mainly to deliver fortune cookie aphorisms while Madonna cranks out the sleaze.
A former icon of sexual liberation, Madonna is showing her age, badly, and the movie reveals a curiously Puritanical heart. Her leering camera judges, and sometimes punishes, her characters for their various kinks. In her newly bourgeoisie world, stripteases and sadomasochism are filth; wisdom is marriage and financial self-reliance.
Despite all of that, Wisdom has a substantial leg up on RocknRolla: It at least aims for coherence, and sometimes even hits the mark. It’s a movie that would probably earn a C in film school. At this point, that’s a grade that Ritchie would probably kill for.
Ratings:
RocknRolla: *
Filth and Wisdom: **
Monday, November 10, 2008
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Changeling
It was only a matter of time before Changeling hit the multiplex. What producer could resist? It’s a nonfiction account of a missing child, corrupt police and a tragic case of mistaken identity. It’s also that rarest of Hollywood breeds: A damn good story that even hack filmmakers would have a hard time wrecking. All the movie needed was a willing starlet and an old-hand director to shepherd it into production.
Enter Angelina Jolie and Clint Eastwood, Hollywood royalty who can make any movie they want – even a slow-burning period piece set in 1928.
Jolie slips into another plain Jane disguise as Christine Collins, a working single mother whose comes home to discover that her son Walter (Gattlin Griffith) is missing. As days turn into weeks, and local detectives fail to find the boy, pressure grows from the public, embodied by Reverend Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich in an extended cameo), a populist preacher who adopts Christine’s cause as a holy war against the police.
The break in the case comes in the form of a rescued child (Devon Conti) who, the police have convinced themselves, is Christine’s missing son. The fact that no one, not even Christine, can recognize the child doesn’t disturb Captain J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), a weaselly bureaucrat who refuses to admit that the LAPD may have made an error.
For the first hour-and-a-half, Changeling is a cutthroat, Sam Fuller-style thriller that wrings every last ounce of emotion from its lost-child premise. It’s mom-ploitation, but mom-ploitation of the highest order – a Lifetime movie with a highbrow pedigree and deadeye craftsmanship.
But somewhere along the line, Eastwood loses heart – unlike Fuller, his meanness only extends so far – and after inflating the movie with righteous tension, he pulls out a pinprick and lets the air slowly escape. Changeling executes every catharsis (and boy, do they keep coming) with cunning efficiency, but no one, least of all the director, seems to know exactly where the movie is supposed to end.
Eastwood still has a way with actors, and Jolie is magnificent in her overwrought role. Few actors could deliver mawkish lines about hope and devotion without looking ridiculous, but Jolie gracefully sidesteps the excesses of J. Michael Straczynski’s script. The rest of the no-name cast is outstanding, especially Donovan as the corrupt cop who knows he’s capable of doing the right thing – even as he knows that he’s doomed to fail.
Lest Hollywood forget that about the seriousness of the proceedings, there’s also plenty of industry glad-handing. At one point, Christine is glued to a radio, awaiting the Academy Award results. Jolie and Eastwood are self-consciously tipping their hand: Changeling is nothing if not traditional Oscar bait – well crafted, well intentioned and a little too eager to please.
Rating: ***
Enter Angelina Jolie and Clint Eastwood, Hollywood royalty who can make any movie they want – even a slow-burning period piece set in 1928.
Jolie slips into another plain Jane disguise as Christine Collins, a working single mother whose comes home to discover that her son Walter (Gattlin Griffith) is missing. As days turn into weeks, and local detectives fail to find the boy, pressure grows from the public, embodied by Reverend Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich in an extended cameo), a populist preacher who adopts Christine’s cause as a holy war against the police.
The break in the case comes in the form of a rescued child (Devon Conti) who, the police have convinced themselves, is Christine’s missing son. The fact that no one, not even Christine, can recognize the child doesn’t disturb Captain J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), a weaselly bureaucrat who refuses to admit that the LAPD may have made an error.
For the first hour-and-a-half, Changeling is a cutthroat, Sam Fuller-style thriller that wrings every last ounce of emotion from its lost-child premise. It’s mom-ploitation, but mom-ploitation of the highest order – a Lifetime movie with a highbrow pedigree and deadeye craftsmanship.
But somewhere along the line, Eastwood loses heart – unlike Fuller, his meanness only extends so far – and after inflating the movie with righteous tension, he pulls out a pinprick and lets the air slowly escape. Changeling executes every catharsis (and boy, do they keep coming) with cunning efficiency, but no one, least of all the director, seems to know exactly where the movie is supposed to end.
Eastwood still has a way with actors, and Jolie is magnificent in her overwrought role. Few actors could deliver mawkish lines about hope and devotion without looking ridiculous, but Jolie gracefully sidesteps the excesses of J. Michael Straczynski’s script. The rest of the no-name cast is outstanding, especially Donovan as the corrupt cop who knows he’s capable of doing the right thing – even as he knows that he’s doomed to fail.
Lest Hollywood forget that about the seriousness of the proceedings, there’s also plenty of industry glad-handing. At one point, Christine is glued to a radio, awaiting the Academy Award results. Jolie and Eastwood are self-consciously tipping their hand: Changeling is nothing if not traditional Oscar bait – well crafted, well intentioned and a little too eager to please.
Rating: ***
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