Film

Still crazy

Bad Grandpa

The dawning of cinema had the likes of Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin risking their lives with daring stunt work while making moviegoers crack up. Here in the modern film era, we have the immortal, the deranged, and the considerably less refined Johnny Knoxville. Knoxville has tried to parlay his Jackass fame into an acting career, and he hasn’t by exactly been setting the world on fire. So, Bob Grimm because huge paychecks are tempting, bgrimm@ Knoxville has returned to the Jackass well newsreview.com numerous times with three official movies, and his body has paid a tremendous toll. The man 3 has thrown himself into the path of buffaloes and bulls to score good laughs and, oh man, has he gotten those good laughs. As big as those checks can be, internal bleeding and broken limbs can lose their luster. So now we get Bad Grandpa, a sort of Jackass movie that has a narrative mixed with hidden camera stunts (very much in the tradition of Borat). Knoxville gets to play one part for the film, that of Irving Zisman, an over-80 letch of an old man that has shown up in past

Who says grandmothers are more important than grandfathers?

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excellent Jackass skits.

This allows Knoxville to keep the Jackass films going, while lowering the likelihood of his head disengaging from his body for the sake of laughs.

The plot (Bahahahaha! Plot!) involves Irving begrudgingly taking his grandson Billy (Jackson Nicoll) on a road trip after the kid’s crack-addicted mom goes to jail. Along the way, the two get themselves into all sorts of hijinks. Director Jeff Tremaine (who piloted all of the Jackass films) provides some bonding, scripted scenes between Knoxville and the kid that are actually quite sweet at times. These scenes act as the buffers before and after the Jackass-type madness.

Early in the film, Irving is presiding over his wife’s funeral, one where he has gotten an audience full of strangers, including church choir members, to sit in and help him mourn. The results are hilariously disturbing, and just about as evil as any hidden camera gag has chosen to be.

Nicoll is quite the little scene-stealer. Knoxville has to labor for laughs, subjecting his body to a rapidly folding bed and shooting through a store window in a faulty kid’s ride. Nicoll need only put on a bemused face or keenly deliver a zinger to show up his older co-star.

The film’s best moment involves one of those disgusting child beauty pageants, and it belongs to Nicoll. The kid winds up in a rather convincing little princess Toddlers and Tiaras getup, politely going through the motions of a pageant until the talent competition. That’s where he strips off his sailor outfit and does his best stripper dance to “Cherry Pie.” When tabulating the year’s funniest movie moments, Nicoll’s flailing away on the ground while Knoxville showers him with dollar bills will surely contend. There are a lot of good gags, with a few clunkers. Most of them are worth at least a good chuckle, while others are butgusting funny. Irving’s visit to an all-male dance club results in some ball-hanging fun, and a fart contest with his grandson has some hilariously explosive results. I also liked a bit involving a virtuous motorcycle gang, and one where Billy asks strangers on the street to be his new daddy.

Stick around for the credits featuring some funny outtakes and, best of all, scenes of the duped stunt victims finding out they are in a movie. It’s actually a relief to see those poor funeral attendees get the news.

I’m going on record and saying I would prefer to see Knoxville dial it down in future film ventures, as he does in Bad Grandpa.

No, his latest isn’t as uproarious as some of the more insane Jackass stunts, but it does represent a profitable, safer, yet still crazy career direction for Mr. Knoxville. It’s the sort of movie that should please his fan base while blessedly lowering his risk for early, bonesmashing mortality. Ω

4Captain Phillips Tom Hanks plays Richard Phillips, captain of the MV Maersk Alabama cargo ship. While delivering relief goods in 2009, his ship encounters Somali pirates who could give a rat’s ass about charity and try multiple times to board his ship. They eventually succeed, putting into play a crazy hostage drama that results in Phillips being taken aboard a space capsule-sized lifeboat with his captors. Hanks gives an expert performance that is just another notch in a great career. Fortifying the story with a terrifying yet somehow oddly sympathetic performance would be Barkhad Abdi as Muse, the pirate leader. One of the major strengths of this film is the relationship between Phillips and Muse, one that basically starts with Muse informing Phillips that he is no longer the captain of his own ship. Director Paul Greengrass mellows out on his shaky cam a bit, and delivers one of his best efforts yet.

2Carrie If you see this new 2013 version of Carrie starring Chloe Grace Moretz in the role that netted original star Sissy Spacek an Oscar nomination, you’ll probably walk away feeling it has more in common with Brian De Palma’s 1976 film than Stephen King’s sloppy first novel. While Moretz gives it her best shot, and Julianne Moore is delightfully nasty as Carrie’s crazed mother, director Kimberly Pierce (Boys Don’t Cry) provides very little reason for remaking the movie. And don’t go to the film hoping for a faithful retelling of King’s novel because, other than a few plot elements thrown back in that were excised from the original film, this is a straight-up remake of the De Palma movie. While some of the supporting cast is OK, the presence of Nancy Allen and John Travolta is sorely missed. The Black Prom, a sequence so terrifying in the original film, is reduced to a glossy, silly mess in this version. Don’t waste your time.

1Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 This is animation done with all the style and grace of a spastic colon saturated with hot sauce. While the first film in this series had a reasonable amount of charm, this one goes haywire from its start right until the finish line. Bill Hader returns as the voice of Flint, the overly excited inventor who, in the first movie, managed to use a crazy invention to inundate his hometown with giant food. Now, the machine has gone nuts, creating a race of living food including cheeseburger spiders and dolphin bananas. The film boasts an intolerably frantic pace, with a plotline that’s scattered beyond reasonability. It’s hard to follow, but it does have the occasional fart and poop joke to make the kids laugh. The only character I managed to enjoy was a jittery monkey trying to put out a sparkler, and that accounts for about 30 seconds of the film. Don’t waste your time and, trust me, your kids won’t like it either.

2The Counselor You would think a movie written by Cormac McCarthy (No Country For Old Men, The Road) and directed by Ridley Scott (Alien) would be amazing, but that is not the case with this bore-fest. Michael Fassbender, so good in Scott’s Prometheus, plays a character simply named Counselor, a lawyer who gets involved in drug trafficking and puts himself and others in jeopardy. Cameron Diaz plays the girlfriend of his partner in crime (a wild-haired Javier Bardem), and she’s just a terrible actress in this movie. She’s required to be bad, and you can feel her trying to be bad at every turn. Let’s just say she’s very bad at being bad. Scott puts together some intense, violent scenes that feel like they belong in a movie where the actors aren’t required to deliver long, boring, unrealistic monologues. Brad Pitt is OK as some sort of drug dealer sage, but he’s starting to look a lot like Mickey Rourke. (He actually references him during one of his speeches.) Scott almost manages a good movie out of this mess, but Diaz and the preachy script prevail in badness. 4 Don Jon Joseph Gordon-Levitt writes, directs and stars in this frank sex comedy about a sex addict who thinks porn is better than true romance. Gordon-Levitt is excellent and consistently funny as the title character, a Jersey boy who’s quite the stud, yet finds himself jerking off to internet porn within mere minutes of finishing with a live woman. His little problem comes to the forefront when he meets Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), the first real love of his life, a woman with high standards who doesn’t approve of the porn thing. The movie is full of porno clips, so don’t see it with kids or a first date, unless you and that first date already have some sort of naughty understanding. Gordon-Levitt has given us something akin to a funnier Saturday Night Fever, with porn replacing disco. Julianne Moore is her usual excellent self in a supporting role, and the shock casting of Tony Danza as Don’s dad proves smart. Danza gets to show some cinematic comedy chops that he hasn’t been able to show off before. This is an overall triumph for Gordon-Levitt.

3Escape Plan At long last, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger team up for a movie together in which they both play big parts. Yes, they have been in the Expendables films together, but Arnie has only done guest spots in those. This one has Sly playing a dude who escapes from prisons for a living, in scenarios where somebody knows he’s not really a prisoner and he gets a big check on the other side. Things go bad when he gets buried in a maximum-security prison and the folks who put him there plan to keep him locked up. Arnie plays a prisoner who befriends Sly on the inside, and they both look for a way to get out of a seemingly inescapable place. Stallone is good here, and I haven’t enjoyed Arnie this much since well before he became a governor. Arnold has one scene where he raves about God in German, and he’s raving to the warden. It turns out the warden is played by Jim Caviezel, who did in fact play Jesus for Mel Gibson, which makes the scene extra insane. It’s junky fun, and will make fans giddy. Yes, they are getting old, but they look great and have a lot of life in them.

5Gravity Finally, we get a big event movie that delivers the sort of thrills absent from too many large-scale movies promising big things this year. If you see this movie, you’re going to have a cinematic trip like no other. This is what going to the movies is supposed to be about. I sound like a movie critic quote machine, and I don’t care. In her first true blue science fiction role since Demolition Man, Sandra Bullock puts herself through the ringer as Ryan Stone, an astronaut on her first space shuttle flight. Her mission commander, played by a charismatic and calming George Clooney, ribs her about her upset tummy as he flies around space in a jet pack while she works tirelessly on the Hubble. Space debris comes their way, and an incredible survival story/adventure is underway. Director Alfonso Cuaron has put together something here that will always be remembered and talked about. This is truly a landmark film.

2Rush Hollywood has a real hard time making car-racing movies even remotely compelling. The latest genre misfire comes from director Ron Howard, who brings the true story of James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl) to the big screen in surprisingly ho-hum fashion. The surprise comes in that the story itself is so amazing, it wouldn’t’ seem possible to render it dull, yet Howard manages just that. For a racing movie, surprisingly little of the film actually takes place on the racetrack. Instead, too much of the film is devoted to routine love stories that seem to be a means of saving budget. Bruhl is decent as Lauda, a determined man who returned to racing mere weeks after being severely burned in a near fatal crash. Hemsworth is charming as Hunt, but little more. Their rivalry was one of the greatest in sports history, yet this movie turns it into a soap opera.