THE GREEN HORNET

Written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg

Directed by Michel Gondry

Starring Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Cameron Diaz, Tom Wilkinson and Christoph Waltz

Britt Reid: That is the balls.

I’ve got to give it up for Seth Rogen. The man has gone from full on geek to perpetual stoner to slimmed down, unexpected superhero in Michel Gondry’s most indisputable attempt to penetrate the mainstream, THE GREEN HORNET, a big budget 3D adaptation of the popular 1930’s radio series. Rogen’s transformation is admirable but ultimately not as successful as it needed to be to irradicate the image of the affable teddy bear character we’ve all come to know, love and get slightly tired of in recent years. Subsequently, THE GREEN HORNET plays like a laid back stoner flick without the actual weed, and Rogen, without the haze of smoke surrounding him, is just not as funny as he is when he’s high. That said, he could have been high throughout the entire production for all I know. It just isn’t written in this time.

Rogen co-wrote the script to THE GREEN HORNET with SUPERBAD co-writer, Evan Goldberg. Under Gondry’s somewhat scattered direction, their screenplay becomes a surprisingly well-woven send-up of many superhero clichés, while remaining reasonably grounded in a realistic place, with the exception of random misplaced bursts of Gondry’s hyperactive imagination. Rogen plays Britt Reid, the only heir to his father’s (Tom Wilkinson) newspaper fortune. Britt lost his mother when he was just a boy and his relationship with his father has always been strained, living in that vastly cast shadow. His life is one party after another until his father dies suddenly. Unable to resolve the public admiration for a man who never seemed to care about him, Britt decides he is going to save the world his way – in a green mask and hat, one bad guy at a time.

Of course, Britt can’t do this alone so he enlists the help of his super genius buddy, Kato (Jay Chou), to be his alter ego, The Green Hornet’s sidekick. He also takes Cameron Diaz into his fold but she just looks confused as to when her career became about playing such superfluous secondary characters the whole time. Together Britt and Kato form something much stronger than your everyday bromance; each of them now orphaned, they actually become brothers. It is their relationship, uneven and influenced by class and status yet still devoted, that makes THE GREEN HORNET so relatable and real, which is a lot to say about a movie where guys can stop time in their mind. This is the age of the every man superhero after all. The trouble with regular guys though is that they are often nowhere near as funny as they think they are.

DUPLICITY

Written and Directed by Tony Gilroy
Starring Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti


Claire Stenwick: If I told you I loved you, would it even matter?
Ray Koval: If you told me or if I believed you?

Can you think of anything more satisfying than pulling a fast one on someone? It’s even more delicious when that particular someone is someone you care about or who has gotten you more times than you would like to remember. The look on their faces when they realize they’ve been had is worth every painstaking effort you had to make to pull it off. You would think then that DUPLICITY, a film in which two very likeable and sneaky folks, Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, who have proven chemistry together from working previously in Mike Nichols’ CLOSER, would be sticking it to each other so bad that you would delight in every jab they made at each other. Well, the ultimate joke would be on you then because, while writer/director, Tony Gilroy, positions DUPLICITY as a feisty heist movie by stepping up the cool factor any way he can, it is actually nothing more than a failed prank fallen flat on its pretty Hollywood face.


When we first meet Claire Stenwick and Ray Koval (Roberts and Owen), they are drinking it up in Dubai at the US consulate. She isn’t the least bit interested in him and he is working her as hard as he can. I didn’t hear it but he must have said the right thing at some point because they end up in bed together. Of course, she was only sleeping with him so that she could drug him and steal some super secret international spy stuff. And naturally, he put aside all of his super secret spy training and allowed himself to be taken in by her beauty. It is fleeting though - the moment, not her beuauty - and with very little chemistry or connection. Yet this is supposed to be the instance that binds the two in a lust that spans years and leads to what we’re told is true love. They reconnect years later in some other exotic shooting location and concoct a plan to dupe two high profile rival corporations (run by over acting Paul Giamatti and understated Tom Wilkinson) and make off with millions of dollars that will allow them to bask in exorbitantly rich bliss for the rest of their lives. It’s a fine plan but I wasn’t buying anything.


Gilroy’s last directorial effort was his first. MICHAEL CLAYTON earned him respect from critics and contemporaries alike as the film went on to earn a number of Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director for Gilroy himself. Gilroy enlisted some of the same players he worked with last time out, including composer, James Newton Howard, cinematographer, Robert Elswit and even Wilkinson rejoins the gang. How is it then that when all these folks got together last time, they achieved such subtle perfection while this time, Howard sounds as though he were ripping off the OCEAN’S 11 through 13 scores and Elswit is practically washed out? (Wilkinson is still great as he can do very little wrong in my book.) Perhaps the blame can be placed on Gilroy’s most tired screenplay in years. By keeping corporate espionage grounded in reality last time out, he made it fascinating and relatable. By infusing it with Hollywood convention, the whole game was played out before it even began.


DUPLICITY boils down to very little more than two pretty people running games on each other and anyone else they can. The trouble is that the games they’re running are amusing only to them and entirely transparent to the rest of us. The truly duplicitous nature of DUPLICITY it would seem is just that everyone on that side of the screen thinks they are so much funnier, so much sneakier and so much more dubious than what we on this side of the screen actually see. Once again, the cool kids are too ignorant to notice that they are nowhere near as cool as they think they are.

Revisiting MICHAEL CLAYTON

Written and Directed by Tony Gilroy
Starring George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton and Sydney Pollack


This Friday, Tony Gilroy's follow up to the Oscar nominated MICHAEL CLAYTON, DUPLICITY, hits theatres. Before Black Sheep takes a look at the repairing of Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, we would like to look back at Gilroy's thrilling directorial debut.

This is a movie about a man, precisely a man named Michael Clayton (George Clooney). The man behind the man is writer/director, Gilroy, (the man behind the words of another famous man you may know as the moniker of the Bourne series) and he is not the least bit interested in pandering to his first audience as a director. Each early scene establishes characteristics of Mr. Clayton’s personality that none of us would have necessarily expected. What we’re given is an intriguing, if not somewhat broken man, caught at a pivotal time in his life. The action does start shortly after all this establishment and while I may not have known Mr. Clayton to begin with, I certainly finished by wanting to know more.


Clayton is a lawyer who no longer litigates in a courtroom but whose major purpose is to clean up messes made by other lawyers in the firm that employs him. Originally, Clooney wanted to direct this project and had refused to star in it if it were to be directed by a first time director. Gilroy somehow convinced him of otherwise and it’s a very good thing he did. Clooney’s portrayal of Clayton is subtle and understated, certainly one of his finest. He is also surrounded by fiercely talented performances by Tom Wilkinson as a man on the brink of delusion and Tilda Swinton in an Oscar-winning performance as a corporate head who can barely keep that head above water. And while it is certainly the least showy performance, Sydney Pollack's turn as Clayton's boss should not go unnoticed as it was his last performance before his death last year.


Gilroy is one of the smartest writers in Hollywood these days and with MICHAEL CLAYTON, he reintroduces himself as an impressively meticulous director, crafting an intelligent thriller that brings more attention to the hero than most films do. By doing so, he makes it apparent that heroes are humans too and there is always more going on that you don’t know a thing about. I have now seen the film three times and it only gets better.

ROCKNROLLA

Written and Directed by Guy Ritchie
Starring Gerard Butler, Tom Wilkinson, Thandie Newton, Mark Strong and Jeremy Piven


(I would ordinarily list a quote from the film that struck me at this point but damned if I could understand half of what the rock n rollas were spouting on about half the time.)

Boys will be boys, even when they’re men who haven’t been boys for a very long time. They like to get their guns out and smack ‘em around in the other boys’ faces, all in an effort to prove who the baddest boy on the playground is. It doesn’t matter to them that the playground has progressed into the entire city or that the guns have gone from plastic toys to the real deal. The game may have gotten heavier and plenty more serious, and the boys may have grown into the more rugged bodies of men, but they’re still bumbling little boys at heart, too scared to do right and even more so to be a failure. This particular London playground that embodies all this manliness plays home to the modern gangster movie, ROCKNROLLA, and the boy at the top of the mountain is none other than Guy Ritchie.


Ritchie has had a rough go at establishing himself as one of today’s big boys as of late. He burst on to the scene in 1998 with LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS. The fast moving action and even faster dialogue grabbed a lot of men by their own sensitive boys, squeezed hard and made them feel like bigger men. (Personally, I couldn’t make out a single word being said and lost track about 20 minutes in so I never made it that far.) Ritchie’s momentum grew into a Hollywood step with his follow-up, SNATCH, but his favour quickly faded after his critical disaster, SWEPT AWAY. I mean, it wasn’t great but critics went in with their own guns blazing. You simply don’t make a vanity project outside of your genre with your superstar wife, especially when that wife (or soon to be ex-wife) is Madonna, one of the most critically panned actresses of all time. No one even noticed his last release, REVOLVER, but now Ritchie is back. The problem is he isn’t really better than ever; he’s just back where he left off before everything was, well, swept away.


Lucky for Ritchie, he’s got a great group of mates along for this ride. ROCKNROLLA’s cast is top notch no matter what Ritchie’s expansive script calls for. Whether you’re watching Gerard Butler dance entirely out of step with Thandie Newton at a party while exchanging brief quips about a heist job or Tom Wilkinson being a right bastard (which he does so well) as the man who runs the streets or Butler dancing yet again, this time in a close embrace with good pal, Handsome Bob (Tom Hardy), before he is shipped off to prison, there is always a sense of playfulness that never loses sight of purpose. The purpose on the other hand is a little too far out of reach. There are bad guys and good guys who are essentially bad guys themselves and they are all involved in some sort of construction zoning law shakedown that touches the junkies of the world as well as the Russian mafia and pivots around this one missing lucky painting, which, with a quick nod to the mysterious contents of a certain briefcase in the modern gangster classic, PULP FICTION, is never seen on screen.


Complicated? Yes. Overly so? Maybe, only time will tell there. A good, fun time? For sure. Ritchie is sharp and has a keen eye for style. He hasn’t quite mastered the balance between sleek and simple yet, as his simpler bits are rendered somewhat puny in comparison with his flare. Still, you can tell he’s having a great time piecing it all together. There are the dirty, dark sets, the driving pulse of the often-obscure soundtrack choices (no more cheeky early Madonna pop tracks to be found here) and the sexy voice-over (a clearly spoken narration that was my personal saviour at times) to provide constant entertainment. My hopes for Ritchie though are that ROCKNROLLA does not amount to he himself being a “Rock n Rolla” – a boy pretending to be living large instead of actually living it. Next time out, I want to see Ritchie one step closer to being a real man.

THE LAST KISS

Written by Paul Haggis
Directed by Tony Goldwyn

If you spend any time at all at Zach Braff’s myspace page, you would read how excited and proud he is of his latest starring role in THE LAST KISS. In it, he plays Michael, a 29-year-old architect who has everything he’s ever wanted. He has a great position at a large firm in a field he loves; he has a strong group of friends who are always there for each other; and he has a beautiful, intelligent girlfriend who loves him deeply. He knows he’s a lucky man and his friends and family see how he’s about to get luckier with his girlfriend pregnant with their first child. He has them all fooled though because he sees this baby more as permanency than possibility. In many ways, this is the perfect follow-up to GARDEN STATE, in which, in addition to writing and directing, he also plays a man in his mid-twenties who does not know where his life is headed. It is only natural to find a similar character a few years later facing the issues that confront you when you finally get your ducks in line. And whereas Michael’s fear of never being surprised by life again is a real anxiety, the hollow characters that make up this ensemble lend little humanity to this reality. THE LAST KISS plays out, with rare exception, as a once-fresh tale that has been spoiled by one-dimensional characters, unmotivated actions, uninspired dialogue and an expectation that its deeper than it really is.

From the way Braff goes on in his blog postings, one would almost think he wrote and directed this film too. Despite not having any way to test this theory, I wonder if the film would have been better if he had. Braff’s creative influence on GARDEN STATE elevated it to a higher caliber of film making because of its innovative visuals, believably broken characters and timely musings. THE LAST KISS was written by two-time Academy Award winning writer, Paul Haggis (CRASH, MILLION DOLLAR BABY). Haggis juggled an even larger ensemble in CRASH and managed to give nearly every character enough backstory to make them tangible. Here, characters are more like symbolic signifiers for Braff’s Michael to go through his own transformation. One of the more notable examples is his friend, Chris (played by Casey Affleck who brings more heart to his character than any of the other younger cast members). Chris is married and has a newborn, whom his wife has grown so attached to that she no longer has interest or patience for her husband. The insinuation that this hell is what awaits anyone who gets married and has a baby is groan-inducing. Yet another obvious purpose is served in the writing of Michael’s future in-laws (played by the always subtle Tom Wilkinson and always fragile Blythe Danner). They remind Michael, and us of course, that a long term marriage is difficult at best but yet somehow still worthwhile if you work real hard and learn to forgive.


Despite all these poorly hidden character devices, I believe that Haggis’ script is only made worse by Tony Goldwyn’s direction. The problems even begin in the opening shot. Feet stroll by in close-up from each end of the frame while the credits appear amidst the limbs. A car approaches very slowly behind them and the camera tilts up to reveal Michael and his girlfriend, Jenna (Jacinda Barrett), sitting silently. The movement is awkward but the effort is noble. She asks what he is thinking about and he replies that he was wondering how he got so lucky to have her in his life. As he says this, a bus pulls up along side with a lingerie ad on its side. Michael leers and it becomes immediately obvious that THE LAST KISS will be about a man who learns to stop thinking with his penis and start feeling with his heart. Only Braff exudes too much sensitivity for him to come off as a typically uncaring guy. By the time Michael meets Kim (Rachel Bilson) at a friend’s wedding (an event that naturally depresses the typical male because it feels so final), he has cemented his stance as the man who has no idea what he wants. This is perfect because Kim is the younger temptress who knows what she wants but has no idea why. They sit in a tree house and exchange thoughts on how the world moves so fast that it is only natural that people break down far earlier than in past generations. It may be a contemporary theory but it feels as borrowed from GARDEN STATE as the film’s soundtrack does.

Zach Braff, post-GARDEN STATE, has become something of an easily identifiable every man. He filled the shoes for a generation unsure of its path and desperately in need of meaning. And though he merely plays a role in THE LAST KISS, he has become the face of the film thanks to all his praise and enthusiasm for it. I can understand his pride in his performance but his character is flat and unimpressive. The man he once personified may have been lost but was open minded and bravely forging out a fresh, new course for himself. The man he has now become walks down a run down street in worn out shoes and blends in with the crowd.