Film

“i’m telling you, ever since Dallas Buyers Club, it’s like i can do no wrong, man. People love me.”

All that glitters

You have to give Matthew McConaughey an A for effort in his latest film excursion, the “loosely based on a true story” Gold.

McConaughey not only stars as wannabe gold magnate Kenny Wells, he also co-produced the movie, thinned his hair, put in some weird teeth and gained some weight for the role.

Sadly, maximum effort doesn’t result in optimized return for Gold. The movie is an uneven, confused endeavor, and McConaughey’s physicality comes off looking like a guy who’s in really good shape simply messing himself up for the few months it takes to shoot a movie. He doesn’t look like a real guy in the way Robert De Niro did when he destroyed his physicality for Raging Bull. He just looks slightly out-of-shape and made-up, which is distracting.

Even if he looked like a fuzzy elephant wearing sunglasses, Gold would still be a bit of a mess, albeit a sometimes entertaining one.

Wells is a fictional character, and the film is based loosely upon the Bre-X gold scandal of the 1990s. The original scandal occured in Canada, while director Stephen Gaghan (Syriana) brings the story to the U.S.

McConaughey goes full throttle as Wells, owner of a prospecting business in Reno, who’s looking for that one strike that will make him legendary. In his search, he comes across a renowned explorer, Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramirez), who has the ties and ingenuity to mine unsearched parts of Indonesia. Kenny pawns his watch, goes into business with Acosta, and starts panning for the real deal.

This is where the movie goes a little haphazard. There are a lot of shots with Wells flying around to different locations like Indonesia and New York. There’s a substantial sequence where Wells runs around in the jungle with Acosta and gets ill,

and another substantial part of the film that deals with the business/stock exchange ramifications of Kenny’s dealings. It all becomes a bit much, a little too hard to keep track of, and ultimately too routine to distinguish itself. In the end, it plays like The Wolf of Wall Street minus most of the fun, but not minus the McConaughey. (He’s in both!) It’s the same basic plot: A headstrong guy tries to take the fast track to big riches and gets his butt kicked hard in the end. Unfortunately, this movie doesn’t feature Kenny Wells trying to get in his car after taking a bunch of slow-release Quaaludes. Bryce Dallas Howard, who had a lousy 2016 with this and that god awful Pete’s Dragon remake, plays Kenny’s long suffering girlfriend, a role that uses absolutely none of her talents. She shows up every now and then looking mildly frustrated, than disappears for Gold large swaths of the story. If the film has a partial saving 12345 grace, it’s McConaughey, who remains fully committed to the role and makes Wells an engaging Director: Stephen Gaghan character, even when the events Starring: Matthew McConaughey, swirling around him are confusBryce Dallas Howard ing and lacking originality. The movie is almost worth seeing if only to see a good actor giving his all. As for simple storytelling, there’s nothing new here, and the big twist isn’t a surprise at all. The movie wants to be a jungle adventure movie and business adventure all in one, and the two don’t meld together well. The movie winds up feeling like four or five movies mushed together. While it’s hard to feel bad for a multi-millionaire, Oscar-winning actor, it is a bit depressing to see one of the good ones do all of this for naught. This is definitely one that plays on paper better than it does on the big screen. It’s not worth the strain he must’ve put on his cardiovascular system to obtain added weight, although I’m sure he had some fun nights pounding milk shakes and burgers. So, at least he’s got that going for him. Ω

420th Century Women Annette Bening, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig and Billy Crudup shine in Mike Mills’ ode to his unusual mother, who raised him in the late ’70s and tried to like punk music as much as she could. Bening is terrific as Dorothea, perhaps the best work of her career. She represents the late ’70s woman, still cool but perhaps slowing down a bit due to too many cigarettes and a general disillusionment with certain aspects of the changing culture. Mills uses Dorothea as a sort of narrator from the future who talks about the events of the film while observing from a perch in years ahead. It’s an interesting technique, and Bening’s performance is a career milestone. Gerwig and Fanning are great as two different women who hang around Dorothea’s apartment, both with their own interesting subplots. Cruddup chimes in capably as a local handyman who will sleep with you if you ask him to. I love the way this film uses music on its soundtrack, from Talking Heads to the Buzzcocks.

2The Comedian Robert De Niro delivers a good performance in a film that doesn’t match his prowess from director Taylor Hackford. De Niro plays Jackie Burke, an aging standup comedian dealing with a TV sitcom past he isn’t all too proud of. De Niro does a nice job playing a Don Rickles-type, old school standup. He’s not entirely hilarious, but he’s convincing in his standup sequences. He’s also good when Jackie is off stage being an ornery bastard. Where the film lets him down is in its handling of modern day things like viral videos and reality TV. Hackford’s take on modern media is woefully out of touch, and De Niro finds himself stranded in some rather ridiculous, tone deaf scenes. Leslie Mann is her usual great self as a younger woman Jackie winds up trying to romance; the two actually make for a convincing almostbut-not-quite couple. Harvey Keitel is a little overbearing as Mann’s dad, but Danny DeVito scores as Jackie’s bemused brother. However, for everything that works in this movie, there are two things that don’t. There are lots of cameos from standups like Richard Belzer, Hannibal Buress, Brett Butler and Jimmie Walker. Yes … Jimmie Walker is still alive.

3The Founder Michael Keaton is flat-out great as Ray Kroc, the sorta-kinda founder of McDonald’s. Director John Lee Hancock’s film tells the story from when Kroc was selling milk shake mixers door-to-door up through his wife-stealing days as the head of the McDonald’s corporation. Hancock’s movie desperately wants you to like Kroc, but maybe we shouldn’t? After all, he swept in and took the name of McDonald’s from the McDonald brothers (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch), effectively cutting them out of most profits and leaving them in his dust. The film is at its best when it is in old-time, Americana mode. It’s a beautiful looking movie that captures the essence of those old timey fast food joints that replaced the traditional drive-in diners. It slows down a bit and gets a little muddled when it tries to depict Kroc as some sort of commerce hero. I suppose if they went into details about how his co-creating McDonald’s has contributed to worldwide obesity and environmental concerns, McDonald’s themselves would’ve mounted up the lawyers and put the kibosh on the whole thing. Offerman is great as the well-meaning, high-standards McDonald brother who regrets the day he met Kroc.

4Hidden Figures Katherine Johnson was part of a segregated division at NASA in the ’50s, a wing of mathematicians who did the work that computers do today. HiddenFiguresdepicts the humiliation she and two other historical African-American figures, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, went through while solving equations that helped put men safely into space. The women had to put up with a lot of racist bullshit, and the film shows their hardships, albeit in PG fashion. Taraji P. Henson plays Johnson, the “smart one” astronaut John Glenn personally demanded check the coordinates before his historical flight launched. Octavia Spencer is her usual great self as Vaughan, doing the work of a supervisor without the title and curious about that new IBM thing they just installed down the hall. Vaughan would become crucial to the implementation of computers at NASA, as well as being the agency’s first African-American supervisor. As Jackson, NASA’s first female African-American aeronautical engineer, singer Janelle Monae is so good, it’s easy to forget that this is just her second movie role. As a composite, fictional character named Al Harrison, Kevin Costner does some of his best acting in years.

5La La Land This is an all new, original musical from director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) that’s surprisingly low on melodrama while full of vibrancy, beautiful tunes, outstanding set pieces and a stunning sense of realism for a movie where the characters bust out singing. It’s the best original movie musical ever made. The story follows wannabe actress Mia (Emma Stone) and jazz composer Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) as they try to make it in crazy Los Angeles. They meet, they don’t like each other much at first, but then they fall in love, which provides Chazelle and his performers ample opportunities for musical numbers that surprise at every turn. This solidifies Gosling as one of the best actors of his generation. He can wow you with insightful indies and carry big-budget blockbusters. Now, with LaLaLand, he takes his game to a new level. He proves he can pretty much do anything when it comes to movie characters. He can sing and dance with the best of them. Stone doesn’t just make her mark with a beautiful voice and expert footwork—she embodies the character with the honest and almost tragic drive to “make it” in the business.

4Rogue One: A Star Wars Story There was a quick little moment in the very first StarWars(now known as StarWarsEpisodeIV:ANewHope) where a character mentions rebels possibly obtaining vulnerability secrets regarding the Death Star. That group of people actually gets their own movie in RogueOne:AStarWarsStory, a StarWarsspinoff that’s technically another prequel. In fact, it tells a story that leads right up to where ANewHopebegins. It’s also a little different from your typical StarWarsmovie in that it doesn’t mainly deal with the Skywalker saga—although a couple of them make notable appearances—and doesn’t prominently feature the John Williams score (although that makes some appearances, as well). Director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla) goes for something a little different here, a tonal shift that reminds of the big change TheEmpireStrikesBack brought to the saga. Felicity Jones is terrific as Jyn, a woman who finds herself with strange ties to the Death Star, and becomes part of the effort to destroy it.

4Split Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has finally made his first good movie since Signs(2002) with Split, a down-to-thebasics, creepy thriller propelled by excellent performances from James McAvoy and Anya Taylor-Joy (TheWitch). The film reminds us that Shyamalan can be quite the capable director and writer when he isn’t getting too carried away. Taylor-Joy plays Casey, a high school outcast who attends a birthday party and soon thereafter finds herself and two classmates imprisoned by a strange man with multiple personalities (McAvoy). In addition to the angry man who kidnaps them, he’s also a stately, mannered woman, a 9-year-old child and, well, a few others. One of those other personalities plays a big part in taking the film into other realms beyond psychological thriller. McAvoy goes nuts with the role, and Shyamalan takes things into supernatural territories in a chilling climax. Taylor-Joy is quickly becoming the new scream queen, McAvoy’s work will surely stand as one of the year’s most fun performances, and Shyamalan finds himself back from the dead. Stay for the credits, which include a nice cameo.