Running With Scissors

Grade: D-

How screenwriter/director Ryan Murphy was permitted to turn Augusten Burroughs’ delightfully wacky, subversive, laugh-out-loud funny and surprisingly haunting memoir into such a dire, dreary, overwrought, disjointed disappointment is anyone’s guess, but James Frey is getting the last laugh that his book deal with Warner Brothers was so unceremoniously cancelled.

A gay son dealing with an absent father who escapes a prescription drug addicted wife who subsequently turns her son into a second husband is truly (I have mountains of self-help books and cashed therapy checks to prove it) the story of my life, but not a moment of this forced, heightened, tiresome and very unfunny melodrama rings true. In episodically tedious and lifeless fashion, Annette Bening is either 1) drug-induced, speech slurring comatose; 2) ranting like a shrilly bombastic lunatic; or 3) literally dripping with tears as Augusten’s mentally ill, pathologically needy and unsympathetically harsh and judgmental mother. It’s an emotionally packed performance to be sure, but one that belongs in another movie entirely – a better one. Brian Cox is a non-entity in the role of an unethical loony-tune psychiatrist who prescribes medication like candy and needs more help than he could possibly dole out to others, Jill Clayburgh dowdy and little else as his long suffering wife, and Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes make one question if they have any acting ability whatsoever as one of the psychiatrist’s freakishly screechy daughters and her schizophrenic, pedophile, adopted brother – one is embarrassed by and for them simultaneously. Joseph Cross brings a modicum of dignity to the author’s flat alter-ego, but only Alec Baldwin manages to rise above the vacuous and unpleasant material as a man forced to choose between his child and his own sanity.

Unlike the inspirationally irreverent book, which managed to tell a story of survival against the backdrop of almost unimaginable lunacy and darkness, the film misfires virtually every tragically comic and hysterically dramatic moment. The book is an embarrassment of demented riches – people snacking on dog kibble, electric shock experimentation, masturbation rooms, kitty executions and excrement analysis to name but a few. But when presented in such an unimaginatively straight and somber manner, it all feels so unbelievable and manufactured one can’t help but question how much of Burroughs’ story is the stuff of teenage fantasy and exaggeration, the ultimate disservice to an author whose work has always rung so absurdistly true.

In one of the film’s more telling moments, virtually every character is shown simultaneously screaming in torment. Would that they had allowed such behavior in a movie theater.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0439289/

The Departed

Grade: B+

“Goodfellas” meets “Prince of the City” meets “Hamlet” in Martin Scorsese’s latest cat and mouse cop and mobster thriller.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon are equally fine (and charismatic) as two undercover operatives on completely different sides of the gangster fire wall. One a police academy graduate corrupted in his youth by a mob boss (a solidly predictable Jack Nicholson), the other a police academy graduate paying through the nose for the bad name of his family. Both terrified of being caught, Damon pays with impotence while DiCaprio pops sedatives. One the emotional introvert and one the emotional extrovert, one the charmer and one the tormented, they are both so exceptional the only minor frustration is they don’t share enough screen time together.

Scorsese is back in his well-worn element, always welcome if unavoidably derivative. Few do mobsters and crooked cops better than Scorsese and, unlike his recent films, he directs with an assured yet unembellished style. If Damon’s trajectory is a touch too reminiscent of Ray Liotta’s in “Goodfellas,” and if Nicholson gives Joe Pesci a run for his depravedly nutcase money, this tale of two moles consistently crisscrossing each other and always a hair’s breath away from discovery is a thrillingly fun ride. Blood ghoulishly gushes from ever pore (Brian DePalma would be proud), inert bodies fall artfully from very tall buildings, people get abruptly and unpredictably blown to smithereens, while still others rally themselves “Scarface” style. And did I mention all that blood? Red is the only color on Scorsese’s palette this time around, and a sense of rich, dark humor permeates.

Martin Sheen is downright unpresidential but effectively parental as the head of a Special Investigations Unit, Mark Wahlberg one-note as a hot-headed second banana and Alec Baldwin a little too stereotypically cop-on-the-beat to be of interest. Scorsese’s setup is simultaneously overpacked and underdeveloped, and the saga is self-importantly stretched over 2½ deliberately paced hours. Note to all future Mafioso-inclined screenwriters: the use of Opera metaphor is a grandiose cliché that is always unwelcome and seldom effective. But the film is also full of both subtle and jarring surprises, rich character interaction and nuance, and double-identity intrigue and pathos.

Scene: Damon uses a dead cop’s cell phone to track his nemesis. DiCaprio hesitatingly answers. Long moments pass. One waits for the other to identify himself. The silence is palpable and painful. Scorsese is in his filmmaking glory, and so, more than occasionally in this meticulously crafted potboiler, are we.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0407887/

Volver (To Return)

Grade: A-

I’ve always been on the fence about Pedro Almodóvar. My review of Bad Education called him “eminently and simultaneously feverish, quirky, daring, maddening, flamboyant, ecstatic, uneven, fearless, choppy, pretentious and thrilling.” When reviewing Talk to Her, I admitted “While I have enjoyed many of his films, I have also found many of his characters so multi-ambiguous, so not of this or any world I can believe in, that they are rather difficult to fully embrace.”

I’m no longer ambivalent. Se adoro Almodóvar.

In a stroke of unmitigated, outrageous genius, the film opens with scores of women lovingly and conscientiously ministering to…the tombstones of their loved ones. This uproarious stroke of bravado sets the stage for a mystically madcap melodrama of murder, death, disease, corpses, ghosts and, above all, familia. Few other directors could fill such a dark tale with such grace, laughter, pathos and lighter-than-air whimsy.

Am I the last to discover Penelope Cruz has so much charisma and gravitas? Usually made of cardboard delivering lines in English without recognition or soul, in her native tongue she is ablaze with fiery independence, dogged determination and steely vulnerability. As a woman trying to protect her child, mother her sister, provide for her family and keep family secrets hidden – while all the while a dead body turns to ice in her backroom industrial freezer – Cruz keeps it all in control while her heart palpitates barely beneath the surface.

Not a weak female in the bunch, three generations of women advise, defend, chide, support, judge, hug, depend on, and even haunt one another. Set against the backdrops of Madrid and La Mancha, tragedy fueled with humor, disbelief mixed with resilience, hardship peppered with vivaciousness and mysticism entwined with reality all seem the naturally unbalanced way of life. Replacing gender-bending with gender-appreciation this time around, Almodóvar revels in these women, who never shrink, shirk or otherwise retreat from the most outrageously colorful challenges, circumstances and responsibilities. As a stubbornly spirited spectral figure, Carmen Maura is a matriarch to be reckoned with, unwilling to depart this world until amends have been made, explanations have been proffered, her children have been healed and her life has been fully lived. Yohana Cobo has clearly inherited the family cojones as a teenager who responds to attempted sexual assault with a knife in the chest, and Lola Duenas is a comic delight as a rather melancholy and ever put-upon younger sister.

There is an ever-present sense of abundant joy in this tale of revenge and reconciliation. Some things are stumbled upon, much is uncovered, by the end all will be revealed, and Almodóvar appears almost as devoted to his wonderful cast of characters are they are to one another.

A kind-hearted, audacious, spirited and spiritual delight.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0441909/