Film

That’s just great

The Great Gatsby

The moment when we first see Leonardo DiCaprio’s face as the title character in Baz Luhrmann’s lavish adaptation of The Great Gatsby is perhaps the biggest “movie star” moment of DiCaprio’s career to date. Fireworks popping off in the night sky behind him, he turns and raises his glass to the camera in a way that exudes high octane, perhaps nuclear, star charisma. The moment comes off as if Luhrmann is saying, “Oh yeah, I’ve got Leo as Gatsby, so every other director piloting every other movie currently playing in this multiplex can suck it!” Now, if you’re a Luhrmann fan, and you appreciated his over-stylized vision in past works like Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge!—let’s just forget Australia ever happened, shall we?—then you are bound to find much to like in his Gatsby. It’s full of eye-popping visuals, lush costumes and terrific soundtrack stunts. I loved hearing Jay-Z and Lana Del Rey during a picture set in the roaring ’20s. More important than any of the visual and audio treats is the fact that DiCaprio gives us cinema’s first “great” Gatsby. (Robert Redford played Gatsby once, and I am falling asleep just typing about it.) His Gatsby is an obsessed heartbreaker, relentlessly pursuing the love of the married Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), a woman he met five years previous, before going off to war. A lessor actor could make Gatsby come off as a true nutball/psycho, but DiCaprio gives us somebody who garners sympathy and makes complete sense in his own deranged, sad way. Gatsby is the sweetest stalker you will see on screen this year. It’s great to see DiCaprio sharing the screen with longtime friend Tobey Maguire, who is equally good as Nick Carraway, who narrates the film as he writes a novel within

the confines of a sanitarium. For me, knowing of the actors’ real-life friendship enhanced their scenes. Their camaraderie feels quite natural. Maguire actually commands the most screen time in the movie, and that’s a good thing. Before he became Spider-Man, he was one of Hollywood’s more reliable dramatic by Bob Grimm actors in films like The Cider House Rules and Wonder Boys. He’s the perfect choice for bgrimm@ Carraway, a man who is at once intelligent, newsreview.com artistic and socially naïve. Maguire always does a fine job when required to look cute and 4 confused. Joel Edgerton is terrific as Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s lug of a husband. Edgerton commands one of the film’s greatest scenes: a confrontation with Gatsby about Daisy in a New York City hotel over a block of ice and some whiskey. Edgerton makes this more than just a standard showdown between two men over a woman. He turns it into a bona fide romantic apocalypse. As the object of multiple affections, Mulligan gives Daisy bountiful charms to go with those fatal vacuous tendencies. There are times when Gatsby’s pursuit is quite understandable based on how luminescent Mulligan looks in the role. Yet Mulligan, an actress of considerable talent, gives Daisy something far more complex below the surface. As anybody who has read the novel knows going in, Daisy is doomed to a dimmed emotional life, yet Mulligan has you always rooting for her to wise up. Luhrmann made the daring choice to shoot the movie in 3-D, and this stands as one of the great uses of the medium. Streaming confetti, orchids, popping champagne and DiCaprio’s face all get wonderful enhancement in 3-D. Some might decry Luhrmann’s crazy music choices, mixing modern music with old Cole Porter standards. This is just something he always does, and he does it well. When Lana Del Rey comes up over a deeply moving romantic moment, it doesn’t feel like a stunt. It feels completely appropriate. Music is indeed timeless when it comes to Luhrmann movies. As for that green dock light Gatsby gazes upon through the night fog—across the lake, where Daisy lives—it amounts to one haunting image that will stick with you. Driving home from the theater after The Great Gatsby, green traffic lights were making me weepy. Ω

“How would I know she’s diabetic? She used to eat this crap all the time.”

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excellent 3 42 Spike Lee tried to get a movie about American hero Jackie Robinson, starring Denzel Washington, off the ground for many years, but couldn’t make it happen. I get a feeling that Lee, who made one of the great biopics with Malcolm X, would’ve done something really special with the subject. This effort from director Brian Helgeland (Payback) is OK, even really good at times, but gets awfully hokey in too many moments. Chadwick Boseman is a great pick to play Robinson, as is Lucas Black as Pee Wee Reese. Harrison Ford delivers big time as Branch Rickey, the man who brought Robinson to the majors, and Christopher Meloni leaves the movie all too soon as Dodgers manager Leo Durocher, who was suspended the year Robinson made his debut. Boseman shines, even when the movie doesn’t, and it’s a lot of fun to see Ford do something this craggy and different. I’m thinking Robinson went through some major hell during his baseball times, and this movie only scratches the surface. It’s good, but it should’ve been great.

3The Company You Keep Robert Redford directs himself as an upstate New York lawyer with a past who must flee his life when a nosy journalist (Shia LaBeouf) discovers his true identity. The film gives us fictional characters that were former members of the very real Weather Underground, and they are played by the likes of Susan Sarandon, Nick Nolte and Julie Christie. LaBeouf does much of the heavy lifting, and it’s some of his better work in quite some time. Redford is just OK here, as is his movie. I can’t say it blew me away, but I didn’t dislike it, either. It’s just one of those movies that gets by with semicompetent directing and acting without truly wowing you. Others in the cast include Stanley Tucci, Chris Cooper, Terrence Howard, Richard Jenkins and Sam Elliott.

3Evil Dead The low-budget classic horror film gets a slick new remake and loses the iconic character of Ash in favor of a girl trying to kick heroin. Mia (Jane Levy) is trying to sober up, so friends and family take her out to a secluded cabin. They find a mysterious book in the basement, somebody reads it out loud, Mia goes for a walk in the woods, the woods treat her badly, and gore aplenty ensues. While Levy is fine in the central role, and Lou Taylor Pucci is good as one of the guys who should’ve gone to a hotel instead, the film has a few too many uninteresting characters. Shiloh Fernandez is a dud as Mia’s brother, and Elizabeth Blackmore is only there so somebody can cut her own arm off. Let it be said that moments such as the arm-cutting are well done. The film is a true gore fest. While it is OK, and doesn’t slander Sam Raimi’s original trilogy, it’s not a horror classic by any means. Like most good horror these days, it’s just good, and that is all.

4Iron Man 3 Shane Black, director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (starring Robert Downey Jr. in his best performance ever) and writer of such action classics as Lethal Weapon, gets his second directorial chore and delivers big time. Tony Stark (Downey Jr.) is now an insomniac suffering from panic attacks after the events of The Avengers, and he faces a new adversary in The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley). Stark is a little bit shaky in this one, and that gives the film a dark, comic edge. Gwyneth Paltrow gets a little more screen time as Pepper Potts, while Guy Pearce and Rebecca Hall show up as mysterious scientific types. Downey Jr. is as fun as ever here, and Black knows just what to do with him. Black is also pretty snappy with the action scenes, which don’t disappoint. If this is the last of Downey Jr.’s solo Iron Man films, he’s going out on a good note.

5Mud It’s official: Jeff Nichols, who gave us the brilliant Take Shelter, is a writer/ director who stands among the best of them. Matthew McConaughey plays the title character, a chipped-tooth, wild-haired drifter living in a boat in a tree along the Mississippi. Two kids, Ellis and Neckbone (Tye Sheridan of The Tree of Life, and Jacob Lofland) stumble upon him, and find themselves part of his strange and dangerous world. McConaughey is just catching wave after wave lately, and this is his best one yet. He makes Mud a little scary, yet charming and cunning. Sheridan and Lofland are terrific as the young friends who should probably stay away from guys living in boats in trees. The cast also boasts Reese Witherspoon, Michael Shannon and Sam Shepard, all of them equally great. Ladies and gentleman, we have the year’s first “excellent” movie. Jesus, it took long enough.

2Oblivion Tom Cruise gives it his all, but his all isn’t enough to save this sci-fi effort from feeling like a bunch of movies you’ve seen before. He plays Jack, a man on a sweep-up mission of Earth 60 years after it was beat up by aliens. He has a lot of dreams featuring a dream woman (Olga Kurylenko) and the Empire State Building, and seems to feel right at home when visiting the planet. Thing is, he’s far too young to have been around when the Empire State Building stood tall—or is he? The movie wants to be clever, but you’ll see the big twist a mile away. As for the visuals, some work (the Empire State Building in ruins is cool) and some don’t (most of the other effects). Morgan Freeman shows up as a survivor dude who smokes cigars, which means he’s smoking cigars that are over 60 years old. He must’ve grabbed a thousand of them and the world’s greatest humidor as the apocalypse unfolded.

2Oz the Great and Powerful James Franco is in over his head for Sam Raimi’s mostly lame prequel to The Wizard of Oz. The title character calls for somebody with that old school Hollywood charm like Robert Downey, Jr., or Johnny Depp. Franco looks like a kid playing dress up here, and he’s not even the worst thing about the movie. That would be Mila Kunis looking completely lost as the witch who will become that witch we all know from the original Oz. I’m sorry—that witch isn’t supposed to be all corseted and hot. As for Rachel Weisz, she fares best as yet another witch, while Michelle Williams is just serviceable as Glinda the Good Witch. Raimi relies heavily on CGI effects—big surprise—and they look pretty crappy for the most part. This is an underwhelming movie in much the same way his Spider-Man 3 missed the mark. It’s overblown, misguided and odd.

3Pain & Gain Director Michael Bay delivers the rare decent film with this crazy concoction based on a true story. Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie play a trio of bodybuilders who decide to kidnap a rich guy (Tony Shalhoub) and force him to sign over all of his assets. The kidnapping plot nets them the dough, but greed and general stupidity result in the plan going south and people dying. Bay uses the story, based on the real-life shenanigans of Daniel Lugo (Wahlberg) to poke fun at the ‘90s, give Wahlberg a chance to get laughs Wahlberg style, and provide Johnson with his best role yet. The movie contains all of that stuff that makes Bay such an annoying director (slo-mo, hyper-editing, etc.), but it works because the actors pull it off.

4The Place Beyond the Pines Derek Cianfrance follows up his brilliant Blue Valentine with a film bigger in scope but still starring Ryan Gosling. Gosling plays Luke, a motorcycle stunt guy who finds out he has a kid and wants to be a part of his life. Problem is, the kid is the product of a one-night stand, and the mom (Eva Mendes) has moved on. Luke resorts to robbing banks, which culminates in a meeting with a rookie cop played by Bradley Cooper. The film then focuses on Cooper’s character for a segment before dealing with Luke and Avery’s kids (played by Dane DeHaan and Emory Cohen) when they are teens. The movie is long, but never boring, and it crackles most when Gosling is on screen. It’s all about the sins of the fathers, and Cianfrance presents it in a way that resonates. Also stars Ray Liotta and Ben Mendelsohn.