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Third Person

It’s been 10 years since writer-director Paul Haggis, quite surprisingly, won some Oscars for Crash, a very good but perhaps overrated movie. That film had a bunch of storylines weaving together and gave some good actors decent showcases. It also seemed to set the stage for a promising directorial career. Haggis has yet to capitalize on his Oscar triumph. He’s made a very good movie that nobody saw in the U.S. (the Tommy Lee Jones starrer In the Valley of Elah) and a so-so, tepid thriller (Russell Crowe in The Next Three Days) since then, but he’s generally fallen off the radar. His latest, the ambitious Third Person, probably won’t do much to change that. It’s a respectable but divisive effort that will confound a lot of viewers the way Cameron Crowe’s complex and unjustly maligned Vanilla Sky did. It tries to do a lot, and it doesn’t succeed on all fronts. Some will see it as a train wreck, whereas I see it as a flawed but reputable effort. What we get is a puzzle movie with Michael (Liam Neeson), a struggling Pulitzer Prize-winning author, as its centerpiece. The once prolific author can’t get on track with his latest novel as he struggles to produce words in a Paris hotel. His tempestuous lover Anna (Olivia Wilde) comes to visit. The two have a strange, sadomasochistic relationship that will be explained later on. The reasons are a bit preposterous, but they make sense in context. With the story of Michael and Anna, we get some connected characters that I won’t reveal because they are part of the mystery puzzle. The film also gives us two other major plot threads, one involving Adrien Brody as Scott, some sort of fashion spy in Italy, getting

involved in bad things with a troubled woman (Moran Atias). This plot thread proves to be the film’s least interesting, although Brody is quite good in his role. The final thread involves Julia (Mila Kunis), a disgraced former soap opera star barred from seeing her son. She’s accused of trying to harm him, and Rick (James Franco), by Bob Grimm the boy’s finger-painting father—yes, he’s a professional finger painter—believes she’s bgrimm@ guilty. newsreview.com The locations change, in a somewhat confusing manner, between Paris, New York 3 and Rome, with all of the characters connecting through some sense of unexplained misery or loss. The film clocks in at 137 minutes, and I confess, it frustrates at times because it takes its sweet time revealing its ultimate purpose. But that revelation is a clever one that works well enough. I’m not going to say it ties the film together perfectly, but it does result in enough clarity to make it qualify as a decent twist. Kunis, an actress who ranges from absolutely terrible to pretty damned good in almost all of her performances, leans toward her better tendencies in this film. Yes, there are moments where she delivers a line or two as if she has no sense of what the line is supposed to do. Conversely, she has moments, including her final big scene, where she is absolute dynamite. After her endearing work in Drinking Buddies, Wilde continues to show she’s an actress of exceptional power. Her Anna is her most complex character yet, alternately mean and vulnerable, completely unpredictable. Neeson gets to take off his guns for a film, and he reminds us that he knows his way around a good drama. Michael is a seemingly good man, but he has some ruthless bastard capabilities, with Neeson being astute at showing both sides of the coin. Franco, who’s in every other movie released this summer, delivers his most realized, sturdy work in years as a man struggling with his sense of obligation to his child and an unstable former lover. There’s enough solid acting for two films to go with the sporadic kookiness in Third Person, a film that winds up getting a mild recommendation. I think Haggis has yet to deliver his best film, and he’ll be able to deliver it once he calms down a bit. Ω

"Hey kid, you wanna hear some of my poetry?"

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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.

2Deliver Us From Evil A New York City policeman (Eric Bana) finds himself up against some sort of demon force that managed to come back overseas with some soldiers who were fighting the Iraq War. Apparently, some soldiers on patrol read evil writings in some sort of cave, and that resulted in possession, and the ability to pass that possession along like a virus. The premise is totally stupid, makes little to no sense, and eventually torpedoes the film in a exorcism finale that features the music of The Doors and bad, bad editing. Bana is OK in the central role, and director Scott Derrickson, who scared the crap out of me with Sinister, can create his share of eerie moments. Still, this feels like a hundred movies that came before it, and possessed humans screeching Latin through muddy makeup is more funny than scary. If you’re looking for some decent jolts, and you don’t care that a movie doesn’t make a lick of sense, this might be OK for a late night rental. Oh yeah, it’s supposedly based on actual events, which means somebody somewhere in Hollywood is lying their ass off.

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.

2Jersey Boys Director Clint Eastwood continues his creative slump with this 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! The film 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. Much of the focus of the film falls on Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza) an early leader of the band and majorly bad influence on Frankie. Over the course of time, DeVito gets himself deep into 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. As they did in the musical, each member of the Four Seasons breaks the fourth wall to address the audience, like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. 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. Young gives it a good go belting out the hits with something akin to Valli’s signature falsetto, and it’s admirable that Eastwood and his performers opted to have the music performed live on set rather than lipsynching. I don’t know if it was the theater I was in, but something happened 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.

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.

2Tammy Having co-written this movie, Melissa McCarthy can take a lot of the blame for yet another bad comedy featuring her playing an uninteresting mess of a human being. She stars as the title character, a fast food worker who wrecks her car, gets fired and finds out her husband (Nat Faxon) is having an affair in the same day. She winds up hitting the road with her alcohol-swilling, diabetic grandma (Susan Sarandon), and virtually nothing works as far as laughs are concerned. McCarthy and Ben Falcone’s script (Falcone also directs) tries to mine laughs out of grandma being a trashy party girl and Tammy eating too much pie. It wastes the talents of everybody involved, including Gary Cole as a philandering barfly and Mark Duplass as Tammy’s love interest. When Tammy holds up her former burger joint employer, it’s almost funny, but most of that scene was covered in the preview trailer. McCarthy can be hilarious—her best film moment may always be the outtake during the This is 40 credits—but she can also be tedious as she is in this and last year’s Identity Thief. Her next film is St. Vincent co-starring Bill Murray, a film that will hopefully erase this one from our memories.

1Transformers: Age of Extinction Director Michael Bay seems to be taunting his haters at this point, employing all of those things that sicken his detractors, and cranking everything up to despicably disgusting levels. Replacing Shia LaBeouf, who was too busy pinching ass and pouring drinks on patrons at a Battle Creek, Michigan, high school production of Fiddler on the Roof to participate, would be Mark Wahlberg. He plays Cade Yeager, a crazy robot inventor living on a farm with his smoking hot daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz). After inadvertently buying Optimus Prime from an old guy at an abandoned movie theater (yep!), Yeager and his daughter wind up fighting alongside the Autobots as they battle an evil race of American-made Autobot clones courtesy of a Steve Jobs-like mogul (Stanley Tucci). The movie is a billion hours long, and none of those hours are ever any good. Some of the visuals pop, but you won’t care because you will be glazed over by the time most of the big action kicks up. Bay says this is the first in a new trilogy. If you should choose to see part one, make sure all of your bills are paid, the dogs are fed, and you’ve winter-proofed your house before you sit down, because you aren’t getting out of that theater for a very long time. 90 Auto Center Dr.