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Archive for the ‘Robert Downey Jr.: ACTING GOD, SCREEN GOD’ Category

The Judge

26 Oct

The Judge – directed by David Dobkin. Courtroom Drama/Family Drama. 141 minutes Color 2014.

★★★★

The Story: A slick lawyer returns to defend his alienated father from a murder charge.

~

“I only defend the guilty because the innocent can’t afford me” is the repost Robert Downey Jr. gives to the untidy lawyer calling him shyster, and it’s all you need to know, because the fact that Robert Downey Jr. is playing the big-city lawyer will tell you all the rest. Downey, with his large, lambent, devil-angel eyes brings his inner mischief to the role. He plays heads on with Robert Duval as his cantankerous dad, the small town judge who is on trial for first degree murder. These are two superb actors, and they make the most of their big fat roles, but nothing they do can rescue the longueurs into which this film falls through over-extension both in length and attempted breadth.

We have rich actors on all sides: the cruelly brilliant Billy Bob Thornton plays the prosecuting attorney and he is given a meaningless scene explaining what he is doing working in that small town. Vera Farmiga plays Downey’s high school sweetheart twenty years later and she is given a meaningless daughter. We are expected to take an interest in matters that have no depth, no dramatic truth, and no place except as extraneous exposition. After all, how fascinating is a herring – even one that is red? Downey is given two brothers, and neither of these, well-played though they are, add to the central situation, which is a father-son situation solely.

It is another example of a film, essentially a courtroom drama, that doesn’t know that things need to pick up in the third act. Instead we have far too many scenes and a courtroom denouement which is disgracefully sentimental, legally impossible, and coated with the sprinkles of a score after enduring which one requires a cold shower. The picture is beautifully shot by the great Janusz Kaminski. The settings and physical properties of the film are first rate. The great talents of Downey and Duvall and Thornton and Farmiga are worth watching for the first two acts, but the picture wearies itself before one’s eyes. You want it to be good, but the screenwriter has betrayed the novel by following it too closely – at least that’s my hunch.

But the real problem is that the film is trying to validate a lie, that lie being that traumatized  relations between family members are resolved by their own efforts. When the unforgivable has occurred, the idea that a two hour and ten minute movie can erase it is claptrap. There is a wonderful scene in a bathroom with Duvall and Downey, true, and to watch Downey and Duvall negotiate this lie without running stark mad is a spectacle worth witnessing. We dishonor the contents of the unforgivable in swallowing such tripe. For shame on the film-makers for asking us to.

 
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Posted in Billy Bob Thornton, COURTROOM DRAMA, FILMED BY: Janusz Kaminski, Robert Downey Jr.: ACTING GOD, SCREEN GOD, Robert Duvall, Vera Farmiga

 

Iron Man 3

04 May

Ironman 3 – directed by Shane Black. Comic Book Adventure. The Iron Man irons things out. 130 minutes Color 2013.

★★★★

Robert Downey Junior is suave, witty, and sexy, and his enemy, Guy Pearce, is suave, witty, and sexy. So the question is not whether one will best the other, but whether charm will best demolition.

For the skies, the earth, and the waters are laced with explosions, collapses, blasts, mass burials, attacks, and not a policeman in sight. Oh, Good!

In all this, I can only give praise to Downey, who is so cool as to be cryogenic. Nothing fazes him. He rises from every blitz with perfect aplomb. He always has a jest to impart and it takes no fall from high places to make him dizzy beforehand. He also has the astounding ability to make pins drop at certain moments with the reality of his response, as for instance with certain women with whom he is at the same moment absolutely sincere and absolutely false. It is very endearing of him. He is such a prick you cannot but let him off scot free, particularly with that wonderful actor’s face of his with its flexible mouth and huge black eyes that are always begging forgiveness. And all that bounce! He’s our Dark Angel, isn’t he? Valuable….

He is paired at various times with that marvelous actress, our belovèd Gwyneth Paltrow, who always arrives in a film role followed by porters bearing enormous quantities of luggage, all Vuitton. Don Cheadle, a welcome presence here as elsewhere, backs up Downey as a military person in charge of just what we never know. Ben Kingsley earns another deposit in our continued respect for him, as The Most Evil Person In The World. Dale Dickey gives a fabulous turn as The Wife Of The Man With The Files. And Ty Simpkins refreshes the entire film as a little boy with a crush on our super-hero.

But none of this and no one —  save perhaps the gifted Guy Pearce who is fascinating and fun as a businessman rogue — none of this and no one is given enough screen time and anything like a scene that we may dwell upon before the screen once again is splashed with visual violence.

The story, if there is a story, seems completely out of control. It takes the form of a smash and a splat. And the plot gathers no strength in its reins when it arrives, very late at the party. Until then, we are raped with the spectacle of calamity upon calamity, and none of them moved me or scared me or more than distantly entertained me, although they are very pretty even when they are hard to follow. And they are hard, for they are edited so spastically who can register them? It is the way with such films. We are not supposed to follow them. We are supposed only to be impressed. The problem is that the effects are impressive without making any real impression. Except for one marvelous air rescue that is really quite simple and a treat. But what we have here is a story in which no one is in peril, which means an adventure story without an adventure – meaning without danger. The explosions are too cataclysmic to threaten anybody.

You sit back and you haven’t wasted your dime. Not a bit. The actors are somewhat wasted amid the monotonous detonations, some of them internal.

Nor can we forgive the stifling excess by claiming it is a comic book, and meant for the mentality of boys. Of course it is. That’s why one goes. But that does not exactly excuse incompetence, does it?  Or maybe it does – if that’s the true subject here.

Yes. That must be it. It is a blockbuster about how everyone flops! Trouble is you never know what they were trying to do to start out with!

But still, it is impossible, it really is, it is impossible, to really dislike it.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Ben Kingsley, COMIC ACTION ADVENTURE, COMIC BOOK ACTION ADVENTURE, Dale Dickey, Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow: SCREEN GODDESS; ACTING GODDESS, Robert Downey Jr.: ACTING GOD, SCREEN GOD, Ty Simpkins

 

The Gingerbread Man

02 Apr

The Gingerbread  Man – directed by Robert Altman. Noir. A lawyer leaps to the rescue and finds himself trapped. 113 minutes Color 1998.

★★★

The key ingredient in Noir is casting the female, and this one fails on the basis of its being so badly miscast as to wreck the movie. The female in noir, one way or another, must hypnotize us, or cause us to be desirous of being hypnotized. She should baffle and enchant and fascinate us, against our will if we profess to have a will in such matters. Lauren Bacall appears, and which of us is not helpless to know anything rational ever again? Who is there who can figure out the beauteous Mary Astor as Brigid O’Shaughnessy? Not I.

In this case we get an actress playing for sympathy or pity or innocence, but the wanness she aims at to achieve this sympathy emerges as a frailty verging on the tubercular. Sympathy is a dull aim for an actor to strive for in a performance. It just won’t do.

And what really won’t do is to have cast an Australian actress in a part which she plays as though her father, brilliantly realized as a mean mountain man by Robert Duvall, had not produced an equally unpredictable cracker in his daughter. Instead the actress in question makes no attempt at a hill-billy accent. Instead of someone peppery and full of tang and fun, we get a droop.

In Noir, the female is more important than the male lead in the sense that our entrancement with her paradox is the element which carries us away from any attention whatsoever with the mad mazes of the plot, which we are not expected to follow and indeed which her presence is there to discourage us from following. So it goes that the plot of this film shoots itself in the foot with all the subtlety of a flare gun, as our attention wanes from the actress in question to the scowl emerging in our brains at the unnecessary and far-fetched plot twists to which we are finding our credulity to be subject.

What did it need? It is obvious that it needed Tuesday Weld.

What it does have is Duvall with oh-such-dirty feet, and the excellent Daryl Hannah as the gal Friday, and Tom Berenger perfectly cast as a lower caste barge captain, and the quirky and inventive genius of Robert Downey Junior as a private eye.

Pierre Mignot shot it gorgeously in Savannah, Georgia, a place which does not register as Savannah but registers like all get out anyhow. The lead is played with mighty dispatch and address by Kenneth Branagh, who evinces all the technical chops needed to play a Southern attorney of great muster and confidence. So the film has that. What it has not is a femme fatale. And without that, we are bereft of our sense of our own potential for self-corruption which Noir is intended to trigger and for us to harmlessly enjoy.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, CRIME DRAMA, Daryl Hannah, DIRECTED BY Robert Altman, FILMED BY: Pierre Mignot, Kenneth Branagh, MYSTERY, NOIR, Robert Downey Jr.: ACTING GOD, SCREEN GOD, Robert Duvall

 

Sherlock Holmes: The Game Of Shadows

18 Dec

Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows — Directed by Guy Ritchie. Boulevard Thriller. 129 minutes Color 2011.

* * * * *

Better than the first one by a long shot. Firstly because it is more witty, and secondly and thirdly because it is more witty. By that I mean that while it is also more spectacular, the spectacle is witty. I am not going to spoil the jests by describing them; let them come upon you unawares. Then too, the story swans around Europe with uncommon velocity and the picture simply expects you to go along for the ride, which is essentially Dr. Watson’s ride, since that is who we have to be, since none of us can ever be Holmes, can we. When a director or storyteller takes wit for granted in his audience he has done the wittiest thing he could do. And always the director lets us in on the joke, by which is meant that he expects us to finish the punch line for him, Alà Lubitsch. And it also means that the dialogue is witty, and dialogue can only be witty in a film if there is really a lot of it, so that we can sink our ears into it and live with the flavor of it as things unfold. There are mistakes, or rather one mistake, which is that, again, the fight scenes fall prey to scrambled editing so that there is no knowing what is going on or what is doing by whom to whom. But these are over early, and the story opens out into its drolleries and detours amply. The décor, the costumes, the carriages, and the protocols are all Teutonic, the jammed living rooms, the opulent restaurants, the creamy excesses of dress and manner, the expression, the repression – all are Germanic. It is 1891 and Victoria is on the throne and she was a German. Victorianism everywhere always has a German accent. And the designers have made the most of this and played off against it in the person and personality of Robert Downey Junior, who is the most romantic in appearance and affect of any Sherlock Holmes before. He never wears a high collar or a tie. His shirts are always Byronically open at the neck. He never does the prim Basil Rathbone/Jeremy Brett thing of the pinched genius with the long condescending nose. Instead he is all close-up and personal and tousled and Peck’s Bad Boy. Of course, like those others, he is dreadfully neurotic. He also speaks a lot more clearly here than in the first installment. In all this he is ably mated by Jude Law, again as Watson, who almost equals Holmes in magical prestidigitations. Stephen Fry makes an astounding appearance as Mycroft Holmes, Sherry’s brother, and a welcome presence he is indeed. Can we follow all this? We are not meant to. All we are meant is to feel privileged to tag along. I liked doing that. It is a sumptuous ride.

 

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: ENGLISH REALISTIC, ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, ACTION ADVENTURE, BOULEVARD THRILLER, DIRECTED BY: Guy Ritchie, High Comedy, Jude Law, PRIVATE EYE, Robert Downey Jr.: ACTING GOD, SCREEN GOD, Stehen Fry, Turn of the 19th Century, VICTORIAN PERIOD

 

Love & Distrust

29 Apr

Love & Distrust – Directed by Eric Kimetz. Anthology. Variations on misbegotten relationships with the world and the self. 93 minutes Color 2010.

*

Scuzzy stories all. With one exception, the acting is Improvisation At Its Worst. The problem with Improvisation is that it does not fall into the category of Acting but that of Performance Art. Performance art includes Preaching and Public Speaking and Stand Up Comedy. Stand Up Comics cannot really act. Bob Hope, Robin WIlliams, Jim Carrey, Martha Rae, Carole Burnett  all  possess and are posssessed by the Entertainers Virus, which pushes them over-the-top or to one side of acting a part. Improvisation means that the actor takes a situation and on the spot makes up a script around it. This turns the actors into fast-food playwrights, and it reduces their acting skills to everyday schtick. None of the actors here are Performance Artists, but straight actors, and, being asked to be what they are not, we don’t really see good acting either, and none of them are good playwrights. The one exception is Allison Janney, who, in a huge limo, white as a baby coffin, bemoans the loss of her lover and then picks up a teen age hustler on the corner. She is excruciatingly funny. She gets the star here. The rest of them should hang their heads in shame and stick to their craft.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: IMPROV, Allison Janney: ACTING GODDESS, Amy Adams, James Franco, Robert Downey Jr.: ACTING GOD, SCREEN GOD

 
 
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