"50/50" Review

50/50 is the anti-MOW. Hot off the festival circuit as the much buzzed-about "cancer comedy," its hype doesn't tell the whole story. Directed by Jonathan Levine (The Wackness), 50/50 is a dynamic blend of offhand humor and compelling character study. Just don't go in expecting one or the other.

Loosely based on his own experiences as a twenty-something cancer survivor, screenwriter Will Reiser assembles a flawed cast of characters for his retelling – himself most of all. Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is not a take-charge kind of guy. He greets his diagnosis with cynicism and reclusiveness, and at his age who can blame him? Holding his life at arm's length, he severs ties rather than strengthening them.

It's a notion that Levine actually undercuts. Whether it's his direction or just the conventions of a hero-narrative, Adam frequently comes off better than he deserves to. His cancer gives him carte blanche to abuse and ignore his friends and family, and it's important that those unflattering traits get their due. The cathartic climax is about tearing down those walls.

Levine is more forthcoming with the foibles of other characters. Seth Rogen plays Adam's pal Kyle, a predictably crass and outgoing foil to Gordon-Levitt's narcissistic introvert. Adam's girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard) comes away looking particularly ugly, and is admonished by Kyle in one of 50/50's funniest scenes. Anjelica Huston and Anna Kendrick play Adam's overprotective mother and fledgling therapist, respectively, and Philip Baker Hall makes an appearance as a fellow cancer patient with an affinity for pot.

Rounding out the cast is Serge Houde as Adam's Alzheimer's-afflicted father. Unlike Adam however, his condition seems superfluous, occasionally lending 50/50 the maudlin air of an issue film. Which is odd, because elsewhere the filmmakers strive to remove sentimentality from the equation. In fact, the nitty-gritty of Adam's treatment is relegated almost entirely to off-screen action. The film focuses instead on the impact it has on his life. Consequently, and in the interest of levity, the threat is diluted.

In that respect, 50/50 isn't even about cancer. The common storytelling mistake, as Reiser sees it, is treating the disease as subject; Reiser's subject is himself. Cancer is just the shitty thing that happened to him. The film begins like any other buddy comedy, and initially feels stilted because of it. Even the obligatory reveal and diagnosis of the disease comes across awkward. But it gradually builds into something significant.

The beauty of 50/50 is in the way its characters behave and bounce off each other. There's no bromance a la I Love You, Man – the friendship portrayed by Gordon-Levitt and Rogen is subtler. Adam's eventual turn from reticence to reliance makes his transformation as a character more compelling than his struggle with cancer. After all, it's not about that.

I don't envy the marketing team tasked with selling 50/50 to the general audience. Cancer isn't exactly a crowd-pleaser, but you can't bill it as a comedy without being at least a little disingenuous. Resier and Levine's film delivers a unique hybrid of emotion and entertainment that tries, not always successfully, to pave new territory – which is admirable in and of itself. Whether 50/50 is remembered more as a cavalier drama or dark comedy remains to be seen, but you can bet it won't go down in history as another after school special.

3.5/5

"Moneyball" Review

Take my review of Moneyball with a grain of salt. Its two-and-a-quarter-hour running time probably rivals the aggregate amount of professional baseball I've watched over the past three years – which is to say, not much. I'm not the target audience for any sports flick, but a great cast delivering an Aaron Sorkin script put me in the seats. On that level, Moneyball delivers.

Sorkin has a knack for finding the humanity in black and white statistics. It's in part what made his telling of Facebook's success story (last year's brilliant, brainy The Social Network) so remarkable. A fitting – if inferior – follow-up, Moneyball is as much about business as it is about baseball. In fact, the thesis of author Michael Lewis, upon whose book Sorkin and co-writer Steven Zaillian sculpted the screenplay, is that victory on the field can be reduced to mere mathematics.

Enter Brad Pitt as Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane. After being creamed in the playoffs, many of his star players pick up contracts with teams with deeper pockets. The truth as Beane puts it is that baseball is a fundamentally unfair game. Affluent teams can afford the best players, and subsequently win the most games and the most championships. But rather than accept the status quo, Beane hires Yale grad Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), and cooks up a way to build a team around underrated but undesirable players, like a pitcher with unorthodox form and a ex-star pushing 40.

"We're card counters now," Beane explains to his mystified staff. Moneyball plays almost like a heist – and cheating any flawed system is exhilarating to watch. The problems stem from elsewhere; the movie drags in its second half, lacking the concise narrative momentum of fiction. It's a problem from which many biopics suffer, and though Sorkin fares better than most, he doesn't have a David Fincher behind the lens this time around.

Granted, director Bennett Miller is no slouch, having made his Oscar-nominated Hollywood debut with Capote in 2005. With Moneyball, Miller faithfully photographs Sorkin and Zaillian's script, but never elevates it. Pitt and Hill are empathetic underdogs, and their performances convey admirable depth. Still, even in their best moments, it's hard not to wish that more weren't going on onscreen.

Moneyball also gets bogged down by superfluous subplots like flashbacks to Beane's fizzled pro baseball career and his relationship with his twelve-year-old daughter. The sequences give insight into the inner workings of the character's mind, but seldom feel relevant to the main thrust of the plot. Especially when they beget a string of false endings that has the audience on the edge of their seats in the worst sense of the term.

Those scenes don't sink Moneyball, but they somewhat stifle its potential for greatness. The fascinating premise, that computers can pick winners better than we can, is partially buried under content far less novel. I've seen enough strained father/daughter relationships, thanks. The film would likewise run thinner and healthier without Beane's trips down memory lane.

But it still works. Probably the best indication of the film's merit is that it appeals to viewers with no vested interest in the sport. At its finest, Moneyball is about the deconstruction of baseball romanticism, with a straightforward exchange of ideas that feels almost documentary at times. Surprisingly enough, it's the conventional storytelling devices that feel sluggish, unexciting, and repetitive. Not the baseball.

3/5

"Drive" Review

After a summer of cheap thrills, Drive delivers thrills on the cheap. With a budget Michael Bay might have allocated for a single effects sequence in Transformers 3, Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn made one of the best movies of the year. Following Bronson and Valhalla Rising, Refn crafts his most polished, commercial work yet, while retaining all the ambiguity and unbridled aggression of his tough-as-nails art house pictures.

Bearing thematic resemblance to Darren Aronofsky's recent output, Drive is like Black Swan in overdrive. The film pins its headlights on the dark implications of unchecked obsession and good intentions gone haywire. That dangerous duality – humanity on the razor's edge of animal brutality – is played to unnerving perfection by Ryan Gosling.

Rightly among the most reliable names on the Hollywood marquee, the star of Drive plays a crucible of a character. A friendly, fatherly figure to his neighbor (Carey Mulligan) and her young son, he's decidedly less so when the two are threatened. A sort of oblique, ultraviolent superhero, the driver leaps to defend the innocent with bloody determination. If the first half of Drive plays as drama, the second is straight up revenge fare.

Playing on the juxtaposition of calm and calamity, Refn keeps us on our toes throughout. Quiet moments stretch into suffocating silence, and the explosive violence that inevitably shatters it practically tears the frame in half. The audio is expertly mixed; you'll want to see Drive loud. From its roaring engines and visceral blows to its curt dialogue, the film is an altar to the power of great sound design.

In truth, Drive isn't pervasively violent, though its most excruciatingly effective moments leave a memory trail like tire streaks on a sunbaked highway. At the heart of the story is a compelling, surprisingly tender romance. Carey Mulligan has proved herself a similarly reliable talent to Gosling, and has worked in recent years with the likes of Michael Mann, Oliver Stone, and Mark Romanek.

Her fragile character's relationship with the driver is subtle and nuanced in a manner atypical of thriller convention. They're not family, they're not even sleeping together. Drive is not a sexy film. Refn fetishizes neither cars nor women; if The Fast and the Furious is the sleek exterior curves of an automobile, Drive is the greasy, undulating pistons. And it's utilitarian at a lean 100 minutes.

The rest of the small cast also impresses. Albert Brooks plays against type as a cutthroat crime lord, and a note-perfect Ron Perlman plays his meathead partner. Bryan Cranston of TV's Breaking Bad has a small role too, as employer and confidant to Gosling's character. Their relationships shuffle as lines are drawn and redrawn, but none of them comes away unscathed by the film's end.

Drive is either the explosive end to a lukewarm summer movie season or an early autumn adrenaline rush. In machismo, it far outpaces its hundred million dollar competition, leaving overwrought tales of lesser heroes like Thor and Green Lantern in the dust. Its troubled characters, and the bonds of desperation that link them, elevate the film above its genre trappings and shield it from disposable entertainment status.

Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive is an anomaly. It's like a 1200 horsepower hybrid. And it's one of the best movies of 2011.

4.5/5

"Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" Review

Horror is kind of like porn. Either it's convincing and effective or it's embarrassing and laughable. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is the latter, and there isn't even any nudity. This haunted house of clichés shepherded by Guillermo del Toro brings nary a new idea to the table, and doesn't even execute on old ones effectively. Chalk that up to first time feature director Troy Nixey, who does suspense about as well as Jenna Jameson does acting. And in the end, it's the audience that gets screwed.

Stop me if you've heard this one. A family at odds moves into a charming old mansion with a (gasp!) terrifying secret. If, during Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, you find your mouth agape, it's more likely your letting loose a yawn than a scream. Guy Pearce and Katie Holmes play parent and guardian respectively to Sally (Bailee Madison), a sulky Los Angeleno forcibly relocated to Rhode Island and relinquished into her father's care. While exploring the nooks and crannies of her lonely new home, Sally awakens a long-dormant evil, and yada yada yada.

Where it isn't derivative, Nixey's film is asinine. Even the title makes no sense. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is a movie that validates fear of the dark. The characters don't surmount their supernatural oppressors with courage; they fight them with light. That is, when they think to. Somebody ought to propose an "all lights all the time" policy in this house, because the amount of time spent fumbling for flashlights is entirely unnecessary.

Del Toro co-wrote the screenplay with Matthew Robbins, and there isn't a fresh idea between them. A thematically faithful remake of the 1973 TV movie of the same name, 2011's Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is haunted by logical fallacies, dull stereotypes, and uninspired scare tactics. Has del Toro become so ensconced in his producorial duties that his writing has irrevocably lost its creative spark? I hope for The Hobbit's sake it hasn't.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is so uniformly sloppy, however, that no one person can shoulder the blame. The acting is subpar; I can't remember the last time I saw an entire cast deliver such a collectively mediocre performance. Whether fault lies with the actors themselves or the inexperienced director is debatable, but that the film suffers is undeniable.

If a paltry few circumstantially effective jump scares are your measure of success, then by all means plunk down your 11 bucks for Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. Just don't expect to be afraid. Every year we get a few great dramas, and one or two good comedy and action flicks. What gives? Why should horror have the lowest success ratio, and its fans the lowest standards? When was the last time a film genuinely scared you?

Audiences shouldn't settle for Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. Like a bad porno, we're left bored by its expository sequences in anticipation of the action. And then the action arrives and underwhelms. We can't even fast-forward. The whole dim, dumb movie is an exercise in textbook tedium, created as though by combining at random items from the approved horror glossary, 666th edition. Horror, like porn, leans on the believability of its flimsily constructed reality. When that spell is broken, it's only too apparent that you're staring at some guy's bare ass. In this case, del Toro's.

2/5

"30 Minutes or Less" Review

Jokes are overrated. The best comedies cull humor from character flaws, and while the cast of 30 Minutes or Less has those to spare, human foibles have little bearing on the way these people behave. Instead, it's about one-liners and crass one-upmanship in a string of exponentially less believable scenarios. First time screenwriter Michael Diliberti (previously credited as executive assistant to producer Scott Rudin) blunders his way past a great premise to lowest common denominator comedy.

Nick (played by Jesse Eisenberg of The Social Network) is a pizza delivery boy who gets jumped by a pair of goons (Danny McBride, Nick Swardson), and strapped with a bomb and an ultimatum: rob a bank within ten hours or face the explosive consequences. Sounds exciting, right? Wrong.

Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer ignores the inherent tension. The homemade bomb should be a volatile, omnipresent threat, but there's never any indication that the device will actually explode. Granted, I'm not expecting Hitchcock here, but if I can't have suspense, even logic would suffice. With a whole ten hours on the clock, Nick and his buddy Chet (Aziz Ansari) idiotically ignore every safer stratagem at their disposal while playing ball with the crooks.

Part of the problem is that McBride and Swardson are portrayed as such inept villains, and occupy so much screen time. 30 Minutes or Less, at 90 minutes or less, prominently features these characters out of necessity to fulfill its own feature-length ambitions. Dramatically, it makes no sense — is Nick really the type of guy who would steal $100,000 at the behest of stooges like these?

A better 30 Minutes or Less would have ditched its emphasis on the antagonists and focused instead on Nick's foiled attempts to extricate himself from his predicament. As it stands, he seems all too willing to make himself an antihero: not just in robbery, but in voluntary crimes like grand theft auto and threatening a cop. It would have been more believable and exciting if the character complied only as a desperate last resort. That his roommate accompanies him on the heist is more asinine still.

As always, if 30 Minutes or Less were funnier, it would be easy to forgive the injustice done to its premise. The humor is hit-and-miss leaning toward the latter, and even my eager audience was rendered deafly silent by many of McBride's big moments. It isn't expressly his fault — his character just doesn't belong in the movie, and there's not much character there to begin with.

To draw a comparison, Tropic Thunder ranks among my favorite action-comedies of recent years because its characters instigate the plot, not vice versa. In that film, dramatic tension is elevated by the conflicting egos of its cast. In 30 Minutes or Less, narrative devices as lethal as Nick's bomb vest routinely hold the story ransom.

But the real robbery isn't a bank job — it's the shameless adoption of modern comedy's worst habits by Diliberti and Fleischer. From their casts of emotionally stunted man-children to their disposable pop-culture jabs and gratuitous bawdy dialogue, the irony of these R-rated comedies is that they cater to a PG-13 crowd. 30 Minutes or Less had an opportunity to distinguish itself with action beats, but the nearest it comes to Die Hard and Lethal Weapon is mentioning them. Even in a summer with little competition, Fleischer's film is light on laughs and even lighter on character. Now there's a commodity that's underrated.

2/5

"Cowboys & Aliens" Review

Cowboys & Aliens sticks to its guns. Symbolically, that might suggest a certain strength, but in truth it means the filmmakers couldn't have played it any safer. The story is a weak hodgepodge of ideas riding past the point of homage clear into Cliché County. The crisp, colorful visuals likewise present an unmemorable wallpaper of established western and science fiction iconography devoid of individual vision.

It's a clear case of too many cooks. Credited to a screenwriting seven, their conglomerated output is anything but magnificent. With a cast of caricatures that includes an amnesiac outlaw (Daniel Craig), a bumbling medicine man (Sam Rockwell), and a grizzled cattle rancher (Harrison Ford), Director John Favreau's crack team of creatives had their bases covered with western stereotypes. Their failure is in their unwillingness or inability to add anything beyond extraterrestrials to the mix.

Stripped of its sci-fi gimmick, the world collapses. These people aren't compelling in their own right, and their predictable reaction to an otherworldly threat negates the period setting. The titular visitors are off-handedly called demons, but the unique perspective of a society that hasn't yet read H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds is absent. Explaining the invasion using Christian ideology might have helped set Cowboys & Aliens apart, but it subsists instead solely on the novelty of combining its constituent genres while doing neither justice.

Presumably because the audience is expected and even depended on not to think, the screenplay circumvents such ambiguity at every turn. Instead of allowing our turn-of-the-century protagonist to make sense of the ordeal on his own terms, religious or otherwise, the writers employ an expendable, expository character to do it for him. Do we really need to know the back-story and endgame of the antagonists? It used to be enough just to know they're here and they're dangerous.

And then there's the aliens themselves. It seems almost unjust to criticize the creature design given how low Hollywood has set the bar, but Cowboys & Aliens' take is particularly uninspired. Bearing resemblance to the grasshoppers from Pixar's A Bug's Life, these cartoony insectoids feel completely at odds with the gritty western setting. Granted, dichotomy is the name of the game, but when they share screen space with our human heroes, the result is more Who Framed Roger Rabbit? than was likely intended.

But far more important than its intellectual and stylistic shortcomings is the fun factor. Cowboys & Aliens has a handful of decent set pieces, though its climactic battle is too helter-skelter to impress. Aerial assaults in the aliens' mechanized dragonfly drones prove most entertaining, though remain too few and far between. Their unannounced arrival is especially memorable and chaotic, but as the scale escalates, the stakes never ante up.

Cowboys & Aliens is a hopelessly average blockbuster. Big stars, bigger budget, and zero staying power. Much has been made of the "risk" associated with Favreau helming such an unproven franchise. After all, where are the wizards, the superheroes, and the vampires? This is not a brave film, nor the work of a brave filmmaker. Universal Pictures inherits the slim financial risk that this oddball mash up won't recoup its hundred million dollars; Favreau himself takes none.

In other words, he sticks to his guns. He fulfills his contractual obligation to bring the offbeat Cowboys & Aliens comic to the screen, but traverses cautiously over the safest possible path to deliver it. Call that what you will, but cowardice has a nice ring to it.

2.5/5

"Captain America: The First Avenger" Review

The sorry state of comic book movies is laid bare in Captain America: The First Avenger. The star spangled superhero hurdles higher than many of his peers, begging the question how he ended up last in the rotation. With the cinematic landscape cluttered with Hell-sent motorcyclists and Norsemen from outer space, could it be that Marvel sought to save the best for last? Nah.

The studio's lack of faith in the character is apparent in the caliber of talent they put behind the lens. Director Joe Johnston (once of The Rocketeer fame) boasts a career blemished by Jurassic Park III and the toothless 2010 Wolfman reboot. Still more disconcerting is the track record of screenwriting duo Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, best known for Disney's disastrous Chronicles of Narnia adaptations. If I were a betting man, I'd be out a few bucks this weekend.

Fortuitously, Johnston's strengths cover Markus and McFeely's weaknesses, and vice versa. The authors offer a fertile narrative, and the director plants personality. He's summoned great actors for even his weakest efforts, and the cast of Captain America shines. An earnest Chris Evans takes the lead, supported by talents like Hugo Weaving as the villainous Red Skull, Tommy Lee Jones as himself as a general, and Stanley Tucci as a mad scientist in military employ. They obviously had a blast.

But the captain's greatest boon is simply having been born a century ago. Set against the backdrop of WWII, the twentieth century aesthetic goes a long way in instilling the adventure with the magic most modern superhero pictures lack. It's somehow easier to suspend our disbelief when the storytellers rustle history's hair à la Indiana Jones. And when it comes to sense of humor, the fewer opportunities for Facebook jokes the better.

Yet Captain America succumbs to its own set of shortcomings. For starters, Johnston's action is inarticulate. Many of the fight scenes suffer from klutzy choreography or are stylistically gimped by passé techniques like speed ramping. Markus and McFeely share equal blame for many of these uninspired sequences, which recast the captain as a personality deficient nobody shooting his way through dim corridors.

But the most glaring flaw is Captain America's irksome link to the inevitable Avengers movie. There's nothing interesting about Marvel's obligatory nods to their other franchise properties — they come off like commercial breaks. And can we get a moratorium on Stan Lee cameos? It was cute the first half-dozen times, but by now their sole purpose is to uphold tradition and to farm further nostalgia for the work of the studio's once golden boy.

Marvel evidently loves taking its audience out of the experience. They'd rather have people whispering to their neighbor than glued to the screen. This is especially annoying in Captain America, because for the first time since Iron Man, the audience is being treated to an origin story worth telling. And instead of letting that story shine in its own right, Marvel literally ends it with an ad.

It doesn't upend the preceding two hours, but it does leave a bad taste in the mouth. If the studio weren't so interested in franchising, Captain America might be remembered as more than a mere prequel to The Avengers — and it might very well be better. The movie has a rare lightheartedness that's absent from the rest of the Marvel's autonomous efforts, and likely will be from their blockbuster crossover.

Regardless of how it ended up last in the rotation, Captain America outshines even some of the higher seed heroes — pity it got ambushed by Marvel's marketing department. The film succeeds in spite of their routinely poor creative decision-making, but a more important question lingers. Did their ploy succeed in selling me The Avengers? Nah.

3/5