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Archive for the ‘Mark Wahlberg’ Category

Ted 2

27 Jun

Ted 2 – directed by Seth MacFarlane. Lowbrow Comedy. 115 minutes Color 2015.

★★★★★

The Story: A living Teddy Bear denied his human rights, takes it to the law of the land.

~

This is perfect material for Mark Wahlberg. It’s a home-town lower-class Boston bachelor–buddy comedy. In this one, one of the bachelors is a foul-mouthed Teddy bear.

So it’s a Buddy Movie, and the premise of the film is that the Teddy Bear is deemed not a person but a property. This leads to convolutions which it is not my place as a sober person to relate to you. But the real fun lies in passing moves of charm and energy and dim wit, and the playing of Mark Wahlberg, an actor whose work I never tire of seeing.

He plays a character who must be ready for anything, and he is never off base, never overstates, never sucks a scene dry, never falters. He is right there in each of the zillion ways his moments require. It is interesting to see an actor at work in a comedy who is himself not funny, but can so fully invest himself in having a good time; it is even better.

The picture opens today, the very day The Supreme Court finds in favor of same-sex marriage, and it is on the instant. For the case before the courts here is exactly the same as that before the courts in Ted. The question is not whether the Teddy Bear can have sex and conceive children. He cannot. He is married to a mortal, however– although at a crucial point his marriage is judged unlawful. The question is, despite his appearance and label, is he a human being?

The very lawyer to argue his case is, of course, played by Morgan Freeman, the least lower-class person you know.

But on the way to this denouement we have many a jest and jape and gaucherie. The funniest of these consists of Liam Neeson at Ted’s supermarket checkout counter purchasing a Box of Trix Breakfast Cereal. For once, Ted is straightman. Neeson, playing A Man Of International Intrigue, grills Ted in whispers about the propriety and legality of himself buying a cereal designated for Kids. Neeson creates a delicious moment of high tension as he knows so well how to do. Every line he says is funny.

Another delight is the law library ballet, and a third is Astaire takeoff on “Stepping Out with My Baby,” a delirious production number that reassures one that Hollywood can still make a musical ­– which this is not, save for a sweet ballad sung half-way through.

I like low comedy. But there are so many of them, I simply miss them all. I didn’t go expecting beefsteak. I expected a frank and beans, and that’s what I got.

 

 

 
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Posted in BROAD COMEDY, Dance & Dancing, John Slattery, Mark Wahlberg

 

The Gambler

03 Jan

The Gambler – directed by Rupert Wyatt. Suspense Drama. 111 minutes Color 2014.

★★★★★

The Story: A man gets in over his head and owes a fortune to three men who mean mortal business.

~

Mark Wahlberg is a wonderful actor.

What does that mean? It means that I look upon him and wonder. I contemplate his visage, his emotion or his emotion held in check or his delivery or what his mouth is or what his eyes are, and I wonder.

What does this mean to me? It means that both of us are in exactly the right places, I in the audience doing what I am supposed to be doing and he is up on the screen doing likewise.

Various things fall in his favor as an actor. First, he seems to have learned on the job, a good way to come into the craft. Second, his essence is working-class, which in this role would seem out of place, for he plays a college English professor and the son of a millionairess bank owner – yet his presence as such is without contradiction because he has conceived the role as beyond circumstance. Irony is the razor edge of death. Third, his male energy does not prevaricate. It stands there giving him, along with his medium-height and tone, the common touch. And finally he knows how to be before a camera such that both the camera and the audience can participate being there with him.

I felt he should have had the Oscar for The Departed. I felt he should have had the Oscar for The Fighter, but the withdrawn character he played was neoned-out by the electricity of Leo and Bale. He’s a first class screen actor. Will someone please hand one to him?

The picture is beautifully directed in terms of narrative intrigue. The director allows every actor forward into their talent. Jessica Lange, always a touchy actor, holds herself in strict check to play Wahlberg’s mother. John Goodman is filmed half naked, which grants us the power of his mass and the mass of his intelligence. Brie Larson holds us as the student taken with Wahlberg. Michael Kenneth Williams makes great book as the black money-lender. Alvin Ing is the still point of a knife in the role of a Korean gambling king. Richard Schiff plays a tip-top scene as a porn broker.

Every scene counts. Every scene is delicious to look at and never distracts with that fact. The music is mad and neat. It is perfectly cast. It is elegantly written. Grieg Fraser has filmed every scene color-right, and the unusual frequent use of closeups brings us into the situation every time. Production design, art direction, costumes, editing – all are unexceptionable.

The Gambler is the best movie I have seen all year.

Oh, this is the second of January, isn’t it! Well, you know what I mean. Take a gamble. See it.

 

The FIghter

06 Feb

The Fighter – Directed by David O. Russell – Boxing Picture. Drawn between the force-fields of his family and his future, a failed fighter chooses. 115 minutes Color 2010.

* * * * *

It’s a fight picture. Which means that it is like all fight pictures in the same way that all Tango pictures are about a certain form, each with its ritual moves, its setbacks, and its dazzling triumphs. However, it is unlike other fight pictures in that this picture is not about someone fighting against the odds in the ring, where one other person doesn’t want the hero to win, but against a crowd — a whole family and town of persons whose desire to have the hero win bids fair to having him fail. Those who love him love him too much to permit him to breathe. They all want the victory – for themselves – and every one of them is ignorant of that fact. They are led by the hero’s immediate family which is led by his volatile controlling mother who is also his manager. She is played to perfection by Melissa Leo, and it is a performance that never betrays the character by letting up on her strategies and her sentimentality and her willful ignorance. Leo never injects the character with a depth that is not inherent in her. She is the mother of seven daughters and two sons, and only one of those sons does she really love, and it’s not the fighter. It’s the older one, a balding palooka played by Christian Bale, in a showy role, an opportunity which he makes full and imaginative use of. The story is based on two real fighters, brothers, Micky and Dicky Ward — and Dicky, Bale’s character, is exactly like the mother, domineering and massively self-ignorant. The picture cleverly opens with him walking in glory with his brother past the local classes of Lowell Mass as though he were the fighter of the title. Even the fighter’s girlfriend eventually wants to control the fighter, played, in a perfectly cast picture, by Amy Adams, as a tough-minded barkeep. The problem is that the fighter himself will fight in the ring, but not outside the ring. He is not volatile; he is steady and withdrawn. It’s the hardest role in the movie to play, for, while Bale’s character tries the patience of everyone in the movie, Mark Wahlberg’s character tries the patience of everyone in the movie house. Eventually he has to get into the boxing ring with his own mother before he can stand up for himself. Mark Wahlberg gives a beautifully judged performance, but one so surrounded by the color and fireworks of the group that it may go unregarded, unrecognized, unrewarded. Yet Wahlberg is able to summon a resident dumbness in perfect response to the drubbing his family gives him. The film is beautifully directed, filmed, costumed, and set, but, of course, fight films depend upon editing. The fight sequences go well; there are three of them; but scene speed steals meaning from drama, and modern editing does our job for us such that we in the audience, being told what to do with every quick cut, are never allowed, any more than Micky Ward is allowed, to let things sink in long enough to register.  When Wahlberg finally seizes the stage the editing needs to become steady to match his energy, but it doesn’t; it remains volatile, and so the denouement is absolutely lost. Anna Magnani on camera must be edited one way; Henry Fonda another. But not here. Which means, we see the picture, we admire the picture, but in the end we do not care anything at all about the picture or about anyone in it at all.

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