We have oodles and oodles of Netflix movies to catch up on, so let's get crackin'! (You can take the Governor out of Alaska, but you can take the g-droppin' out of the Governor.)
I've had a recent semi-fascination with famed hard-boiled mystery writer Raymond Chandler, which has gotten me to seek out some of the film adaptations of his work. I've already seen the Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall version of The Big Sleep, the first Phillip Marlowe novel by Chandler, so I thought I'd give the '70s Robert Mitchum version a try. How bad could it be? I mean, Mitchum as Marlowe...that's pretty perfect casting, right? WRONG. This tedious, boring, horribly acted piece of crap not only takes him out of his 1940s film noir milieu, it changes locale from Los Angeles to London! While the story is basically intact, moving Marlowe to London is like having King Kong climb the Leaning Tower of Pisa. While Mitchum maintains his cool--at least until he puts on those giant Swifty Lazar glasses and looks like an old New Yorker in line at a Palm Beach Dennys--everyone else in this festering piece of crap hams it up to the high heavens, including a trio of filmdom's most forgettable actresses: Candy Clark, Sarah Miles, and Joan Collins, plus Oliver Reed and Richard Boone, both playing to the back row of every theater in the world. Jimmy Stewart also appears, in one of his last theatrical roles, and--always the canny actor--appears in only two short scenes. Ignore this, please. I'm hoping to see Mitchum's other Chandler movie, Farewell My Lovely, which at least kept Marlowe in L.A. and the '40s.
Married Life is one of those interesting little indie films that sucks you in with its cast. In this case, it's Chris Cooper, Pierce Brosnan, Patricia Clarkson, and Rachel McAdams. It's a period piece, a little O'Henry like story set in the late '40s, with Cooper as a married man who falls for McAdams, a young war widow. He still loves his wife (Clarkson), but figures the only right way to end his marriage is to kill her. Along the way, he introduces his best friend (Brosnan) to his new girl, and the best friend promptly falls for her, too. It's an effective and suspenseful movie, but it could probably be construed to be a bit of a black comedy, too. And I'd pretty much watch these four actors in anything, to tell the truth.
I pretty much can't figure out The Promotion. It's the story of two guys--Seann William Scott and John C. Reilly--competing for the manager job at the newest store in a big grocery chain in Chicago. On the surface, it seems like it should be a broad Apatow-like comedy, the kind of stuff Reilly has played in for the last 2 years, but it's more of a quiet, indy type movie, and that may be both its saving grace and ultimate failure. You keep waiting for that big, funny moment to come, and it never does, but yet the characters are flawed and appealing and reasonably real. Extra points for the lovely Jenna Fischer as Scott's encouraging wife, hopeful of him getting the big promotion so they can finalize their plans to buy a house. I suppose any movie that tries to get the protagonists out of an apartment with walls so thin they can hear the banjo-playing neighbor having banjo-playing sex is a bit on the wry side. Too bad it didn't try and stay on that side for the entire movie.
Speakin' of the life of Reilly, I made the mistake of renting Step Brothers. Another Judd Apatow movie (I think the fourth of his that I've seen this year), and from the same team that brought us the unforgettable horrific Talladega Nights, Step Brothers isn't quite so bad, but it certainly tries. At least this time in the tale of two misbegotten man-boys whose mom and dad get married and force them all to live together, there appears to be an actual script. As opposed to what seemed like rampant ad-libbing on the set of Talladega Nights. I like Reilly more than I like co-star Will Ferrell these days. The latter has become the most over-exposed actor in movies, as ubiquitous and annoying as Robin Williams was 20 years ago. Reilly needs to go back and do a drama or two again, and remind us he has acting chops and doesn't just appear as part of Apatow's travelling circus and clown show.
Speaking of Apatow, I thought for sure he had something to do with Tropic Thunder, the Hollywood spoof that features Ben Stiller (who also directed), Jack Black, and Robert Downey Jr. as 3 pampered stars who end up in the wilds of Viet Nam on their own while making the war movie to end all war movies. I loved the opening of this movie with the fake trailers, and even enjoyed it up until the 3 get cut loose in the jungle, but from there it all goes rapidly downhill and becomes repetitive and boring, except when Tom Cruise shows up as the manic and gross Joel Silver like producer. Both Cruise and Downey deserve Academy Award nominations for their work in this, and don't get me wrong--it IS funny, just a little too long.
Finally, there's Death Defying Acts, a lovely little film directed by Australian film director Gillian Armstrong. It takes the true-life story of famed escape artist Harry Houdini, who in the prime of his career lost his beloved mother and tried his best to communicate with her beyond the grave. What Houdini found was a host of charlatans and fakes when it came to the whole psychic game, and he offered $10,000 to the one person who could tell him what his mother said to him on her death bed. In this fictional account, Houdini (Guy Pearce) meets up with Scottish psychic and music hall act Mary McGarvie (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and her young daughter and partner Benjie (Saorise Ronan), who compete for the prize Houdini is offering. But even this psychic couldn't predict the married Houdini would fall for the con artist McGarvie. All three leads are wonderful (Ronan, who also appeared in Atonement and will star in the upcoming The Lovely Bones is poised for major stardom as a child actor on the cusp of her teenage years with acting chops that equal or surpass Jodie Foster at the same age), and Armstrong's direction is wonderful. The entire production perfectly captures Edinburgh, Scotland in the late teens and is beautifully shot, edited and realized. It's probably not for everyone--it's a wee slow movin'--but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Whew! That's a lot of movie watchin'!
