Film

Poor seasons

Jersey Boys

Director Clint Eastwood continues his creative slump with Jersey Boys, a drab adaptation of the Broadway musical which further proves something that Eastwood established 45 years ago with his appearance in Paint Your Wagon: Dirty Harry has no business being around a movie musical! Oh sure, he’s musically inclined. He’s been composing scores for some of his movies as of late, but I’d like to point out that those scores kind of suck, especially that stupid “Gran Torino” song. His musical taste travel towards the meandering and sleepy.

2Jersey Boys tells the story of Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young, who performed the role on Broadway) and The Four Seasons, and how they went from being small time hoods in New Jersey to big time rock stars. I’ve never seen the Broadway show, but I have to think its success means it was somewhat enjoyable and lively. The movie version is neither of these things. As they did in the musical, each member of the Four Seasons breaks the fourth wall to address the audience, Ray Liotta in Goodfellas or Ferris Bueller style. It’s a gimmick that feels forced the way Eastwood stages it. Every time somebody faced the camera and started gabbing in this movie, I found myself getting annoyed. Much of the focus of the film falls on Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza), an early leader of the band and a bad influence on Frankie. Over the course of time, DeVito gets himself deep in debt to the point that he has to be bailed out by a friend in the mob, represented here as Gyp DeCarlo and played by Christopher Walken in a thankless role.

The movie follows the band through their early session musician days, and even includes a brief appearance by Joe Pesci (Joseph Russo) before his Hollywood emergence. Pesci apparently had a real life role in getting the original band together. The Four Seasons have some great songs, including “Rag Doll,” “Walk Like by Bob Grimm a Man” and “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night!).” Young gives it a good go belting bgrimm@ out the hits with something akin to Valli’s newsreview.com signature falsetto, and it’s admirable that Eastwood and his performers opted to have the music performed live on set rather than lip-synching. I don’t know if it was the theater I was in, but something happens in the final mix that flattens the overall musical presentation. The songs, although competently performed, lack a certain spark. They just feel like pale copies of the originals. The timing for this film seems a bit odd. It arrived with little to no fanfare during a drab week of the summer movie season, where it was pitted against Think

“We’re no substitute  for the real thing.”

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excellent Like a Man, Too. It’s almost as if Warner Brothers knew they had a stinker on their hands, and tried to dump their movie in a week with little competition to give it a fighting chance. Clint Eastwood films usually get high profile, awards season releases, but this one was snuck out there for an unsuspecting, unresponsive public.

Let it be said that this is the second Eastwood movie in a row—after the terrible J. Edgar—to feature brutally bad makeup. As the movie travels from the ’60s into the ’70s, it’s a parade of bad wigs and hilarious mustaches. By the time The Four Seasons reunite for their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1990, they look, well, silly. I’ve concocted better old man makeup on Halloween using flour and baby powder.

The movie does come alive during the closing credits, where all the members of the cast gather for a triumphant musical medley finale. It’s the only time that Jersey Boys feels like a legitimate, joyful movie musical and has a real pulse. It’s much too little, way too late. Ω

422 Jump Street Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum, an unlikely duo if there ever was one, basically repeat the same steps of their very funny 21 Jump Street, and they do it in a way that keeps things fresh while knowingly recycling the same plot. And by knowingly, I mean this film acknowledges what it is, a run-of-the-mill sequel, for its entire running time. It’s a self-mocking technique that works well thanks to its stars and the deft comic direction of returning directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who are on a roll, having also directed this year’s The Lego Movie. This one picks up where the first film left off, with Captain Dickson (Ice Cube in serious comic overdrive) assigning Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) to college. In college, they will do exactly what they did undercover in the first movie: Infiltrate the dealers, find the supplier. They get the laughs the same way, through Hill’s self-deprecating, rat-a-tat delivery, and Tatum’s dumb lug shtick. It worked well the first time, and it works well again.

5Edge of Tomorrow In the future, Earth is fighting a crazed, vicious alien force that’s shredding our armies with little effort. Tom Cruise plays Cage, an armed forces officer who serves more as a public relations man than anybody who belongs on a battlefield. After a publicity tour, he sits down with a hard-nosed general (a cold Brendan Gleeson) and finds out that he is going into battle. Cage is justifiably terrified, and his first taste of battle doesn’t go well, and he’s killed in especially gruesome fashion. For reasons I won’t give away, he instantly wakes up after his death, transported back to a moment shortly after his meeting with the general, and before the battle that will take his life. Cage is in a seriously messed up situation. He starts repeating the same day, and dying every time. He does his best to change that outcome, but he always winds up meeting a grisly death and waking up in the same place. He eventually comes into contact with Rita (Emily Blunt), the military’s poster girl for the perfect soldier. By repeating days with Rita, Cage starts to build himself up as a soldier, discover secrets about the enemy, and increasing life longevity chances for himself and mankind. The film’s handling of this situation is thrilling and even funny, thanks to Cruise’s strong performance and nice direction by Doug Liman (Swingers, The Bourne Identity). It will easily stand as one of 2014’s best.

5The Fault In Our Stars I will not lie to you. Sometimes, I walk into a movie theater with drooping shoulders, generally uninterested in what a movie might offer due to advance trailer previews or press that failed to generate my excitement. I walked into this one feeling that way, fearing I was in for a sap-fest. Boy, was I wrong. Shailene Woodley is downright incredible as Hazel, a 16 year-old struggling with thyroid cancer. After being sent to a support group by her mother (Laura Dern—I just love her) she meets Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort—so charming it’s almost disgusting) a basketball player who lost his leg to cancer, but sure as hell hasn’t lost his lust for life. The two hit it off, and the result is the best teen romance since The Spectacular Now, which also starred Woodley. The film handles its subject matter with enough grace for a thousand movies. When Gus, Hazel and her mom travel to Amsterdam to meet Hazel’s favorite author (Willem DaFoe—on freaking fire), their meeting will stand as one of the best scenes of 2014. Much praise goes to director Josh Boone for making a supremely entertaining film, and to author John Green, who wrote the 2012 novel the film is based on. You could call it a tearjerker, but that seems a little insulting to me. There’s nothing manipulative about Boone’s direction, or the performances by Woodley, Elgort, Dern, Nat Wolff and everybody else in the cast. They all won me over in a big way.

2Maleficent Angelina Jolie plays the title character, the infamous horned villain from Sleeping Beauty. There’s a little bit of revisionist history here, with Maleficent portrayed as more of a fallen angel rather than a straight up baddie. The whole thing almost works because Jolie is damned good in this film, especially when the script allows for her to bellow curses and just act devilish. It gets a little sleepy at times when it deals with, well, Sleeping Beauty (Elle Fanning), the young woman who stands to have a very bad 16th birthday thanks to a Maleficent curse. Jolie has a creepy getup that I thought would bother me, but I kind of liked looking at it after a while. It’s the world surrounding her that I found a bit pedestrian. Director Robert Stromberg worked as a production designer on films like Alice in Wonderland, Avatar and Oz the Great and Powerful. I didn’t like any of those movies and, in the end, I don’t really like this one. At this point in watching Stromberg’s work, I’m just not taken by his weird visual worlds. They put me off for some reason, and have a choppy pop-up book feel to them. On the plus side, it is better than Alice and Oz, and perhaps even Avatar. On the negative side, it’s still not all that good.

2A Million Ways to Die in the West Seth MacFarlane’s second feature directorial effort after the breezy and hilarious Ted is a lumbering, only sporadically funny enterprise. It’s not awful, and it does have its share of giggles, but it can’t be classified as anything near a good movie. That’s a kick in the balls, because some slicker editing and “Whoa, Nellie!” pulling back on the gross-out reins could’ve kept this thing closer to 90 minutes instead of nearly two hours and gotten rid of the moments that go too far in a bad way. Like Mel Brooks before him with the classic Blazing Saddles, MacFarlane tries to make a satiric Western that truly looks and feels like a Western. He gets the shots right via decent cinematography, but his tempo is way off. While Blazing Saddles had the exuberance of a grand western, MacFarlane’s dependence on comic violence and often slow pacing feels like he’s trying to make something like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven in a funny way. It just doesn’t work. MacFarlane plays Albert, a snarky, aheadof-his-time sarcastic guy trying to survive in the great American West. He’s trying to make a go of it as a sheep farmer, but he’s terrible at it. He’s always getting into trouble with his wise mouth, and his inability to stand up for himself in manly gunfights has earned the ire of his girlfriend, Louise (Amanda Seyfried). Charlize Theron is a nice presence as the new girl in town who gets Albert smiling again, but she isn’t enough to make this worth seeing.

4The Rover In a post economic collapse Australia, Eric (Guy Pearce) stops for a drink in a dirty bar and promptly has his car stolen. He gets a truck in exchange for that car, but he doesn’t care, and immediately begins a relentless pursuit of his vehicle. Along the way, he picks up Rey (Robert Pattinson), an injured brother of one of the car thieves. They form a strange alliance that results in many deaths in the pursuit of an automobile and retribution. David Michod (Animal Kingdom) has made a moody film using a mighty uncomfortable-looking Australian Outback. Pearce delivers some of his finest, fiercest work since the underrated The Proposition, while Pattinson is extremely good as the simple, messed-up Rey. The film also features Scoot McNairy, an actor piling up the great performances, in a small role but very noticeable role as Rey’s brother. The film is full of stark imagery, sudden violence, and dirt. Everything is covered in dirt. The grime suits the story, a story that proves that you don’t need a heavy, complicated plot to make a good movie.

4X-Men: Days of Future Past Director Bryan Singer returns to the XMen franchise with this ingenious chapter that includes both the main X-Men casts, time travel and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine holding everything together. The movie starts in the future, where robotic monsters called the Sentinels are giving the Mutants a truly hard time in a post-apocalyptic world. All hope seems to be lost until Charles Xavier/Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and his crew figure out a way to time travel. The hope is to cease the production of the Sentinels, which were created by Dr. Bolivar Trask (the always excellent Peter Dinklage) and take Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) off a dangerous destructive path. Jackman’s Logan makes the trip the 1970s, where he wears a cool leather coat and still has bone claws. The action is terrific, especially in a sequence where Peter/ Quicksilver (Evan Peters) foils a gun attack, and another where young Magneto (Michael Fassbender) uses an entire baseball stadium for nefarious purposes. The cast’s true standout would be James McAvoy as young Charles, still messed up after the events of X-Men: First Class. He adds a truly dramatic dimension to the proceedings. Having Singer back proves to be a good thing. The franchise surely suits his talents.