Seven Psychopaths

Seven Psychopaths is violent, funny, and a great time at the movies.

Here's the setup: screenwriter Colin Farrell has a deadline and no screenplay. I know – this sounds like every bad Creative Writing assignment that begins with “The writer sat at his desk, staring at the clock and wiping flop sweat from his brow.” But what if the next paragraph read, “Then Sam Rockwell turned up. He was the writer's best friend, and he ran a Hollywood dognapping operation with small-time crook Christopher Walken. They had a problem?”

Your reaction to that last sentence was predicated on your appreciation for Sam Rockwell and Christopher Walken, both of whom Can Do No Wrong (CDNW). Each of these guys are usually the best thing about whichever movie they're in, and they're both great here. That said, Seven Psychopaths is really the “How Awesome is Sam Rockwell?” movie, so Walken only dials it up to ten in this one. This is one of Seven Psychopaths' many smart moves: by giving Rockwell space to do his thing, it actually makes us appreciate Walken more. Further, Seven Psychopaths makes Farrell a straight man in service to Rockwell's over-the-top performance, and the former shows a remarkable gift for subtle comic timing.

[Aside: It has taken me a while to warm up to Farrell. He was fine in a pretty straightforward role in the odious Tigerland, then someone in Hollywood decided he was going to be the Next Big Thing and got him cast in travesties like Daredevil. He disappeared for a while, then came back strong with InBruges, Fright Night, and Seven Psychopaths. The man has a long way to go to claim CDNW status, but he's back on my radar.]

Of course, this is a film called Seven Psychopaths; so psychopaths do turn up, operatic volumes of blood do get spilled, and a good time is had by all. All this, plus a clever script, terrific performances, and laugh-out-loud moments make Seven Psychopaths my biggest and most pleasant surprise of the summer.

Iron Man 2

IRON MAN 2 is a great, great movie.  That is, if you love reading Popular Mechanics.  Because if there’s one thing IRON MAN 2 delights in showing us, it’s long sequences of guys welding.  And dragging cables.  And doing, y’know, Metal Shop stuff.

Me, I don’t read Popular Mechanics.  I never took Metal Shop.  Long stretches of IRON MAN 2 bored me out of my mind. 

That’s not to say that Robert Downey, Jr. isn’t fantastic in what will become his signature role.  Or that Scarlett Johansson (as a superduperspy) doesn’t look great in a catsuit.  It doesn’t even mean that stuff doesn’t blow up real good.  It just means that I didn’t care.

I didn’t care about Iron Man’s big fight with his best friend (a role demanding far less gravitas than The Great Don Cheadle brought to bear).  I didn’t care about the Big Villain’s boring revenge story.  And I certainly didn’t care about the intricacies of corporate reorganization.

By the time the Big Villain, who wasn’t nearly as interesting as the Little Villain, unleashed his evil plan, I’d grown so worn out with pseudo-physics, quasi-engineering bull$#!^ that I could only marvel that this film failed to learn the basic lesson of the Star Wars prequels.  To wit, fighting robots are dull.  Their destruction carries no emotional heft, because they’re things.  You might as well have given me twenty minutes of Iron Man unplugging refrigerators.

For all that, however, IRON MAN 2 does offer something to make it worth seeing.  It’s not on the posters and it’s not in the ads, however: it’s a secret weapon named Sam Rockwell, upon whom I now formally grant Can Do No Wrong status.  Rockwell plays the Little Villain, the CEO of Stark Corporation’s primary competitor in the weapons business.  His name is Justin Hammer, and he’s a weasely, sniveling wannabe Tony Stark who absolutely steals every second he’s on screen.  Let me say that again:  Sam Rockwell (CDNW) steals the screen from Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, and The Great Don Cheadle.  I didn’t think anyone could upstage any of these actors; but Rockwell’s Justin Hammer is so deliciously slimy, so wily yet such a doofus, that he runs away with this movie.  After GALAXY QUEST, THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND, CHOKE, MOON, and now IRON MAN 2, I can safely assert that Sam Rockwell has arrived.  This actor, truly, can do no wrong.

So, yeah, IRON MAN 2 has a whole lot working against it.  But its bright spot is very, very bright.  If they make another film in this series, I hope they call it JUSTIN HAMMER.

Frost/Nixon

FROST/NIXON captured my imagination from beginning to end. It took interesting people through definitive moments in their lives and the life of the nation, immersed us in their stories, and executed the impossible task of generating tension in a scenario whose conclusion we already know. And it does it while avoiding the talkfest trap so common to adaptations of successful plays.

Look, Nixon's interesting and we all know Frank Langella can act. So the movie's two strikes up in the count coming right out of the pen. But David Frost, the vapid talk show host who gets lucky with a big fish? And Michael Sheen to play him? Well, Sheen's a revelation. In THE QUEEN, he *was* Tony Blair, with all that entails. In FROST/NIXON, he does a David Frost whose shallowness hides depths of ambition and desperation that may be hidden even to himself. This guy's got range, and he also just got on to my "actors to watch" list. He makes David Frost, cheeseball tv performer, a hero the audience can get behind, and we relish the comparisons and contrasts with Langella's controlled, savvy, but lost Nixon.

Director Ron Howard handles those comparisons and contrasts, the heart of the movie, simply enough for a mainstream audience yet maturely enough for smart people like us. His direction, never flashy, borders on documentarian; and it gives the picture the realism it needs while remaining cinematic.

This is a quality film.

Choke

I didn’t know that Sam Rockwell existed before I saw this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1LWg1jFp4E . It’s amazing how one video can catapult a guy into near – CDNW territory. In CHOKE, an adaptation of Chuck Pahlaniuk’s novel about a historical reenactor / sex addict / possible cloned son of Jesus Christ who, um, well, let’s just leave it at that, Rockwell seals the deal. Ok, I’ve only seen a few of his pictures, and I didn’t even particularly like his portrayal of Zaphod Beeblebrox, but to hell with it – Sam Rockwell Can Do No Wrong.

Why? Because he takes this tragic, deeply flawed, possibly irredeemable man and makes him the funniest comic character I’ve seen since Jason Segel in FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL. And he does it not in a comedy that lurches from set piece to set piece, that works the old rhythm of setup – payoff – setup – payoff, but in a quirky and interesting character study of the kinds of people we avoid in real life but are great fun to hang out with on the silver screen. CHOKE is an adult comedy in that, sure, it has sex and profanity and all that kind of stuff; but CHOKE is an adult comedy because it operates with adult and finds its humor in people, places, and actions that it takes a few miles on the odometer to appreciate.

And Rockwell, he knows how to tread the line between villain and rascal. He knows how to be funny while acting dead serious, and here he creates a character so serious that we can’t help but laugh. I rented CHOKE on the strength of his name on the poster, and he doesn’t disappoint. This is my comedy to beat for 2009.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

So, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," George Clooney's directorial debut. Sam Rockwell, the Once and Future Zaphod Beeblbrox, plays 'Gong Show' creator Chuck Barris in the kind of autobiography one might expect when listening to the life story of a compulsive liar. I don't even know if the real Barris is a compulsive liar, but this tale is so cool, has so many loose ends, and makes such a fun antihero of Barris that it set off my bullshit alarm in a big, big way.

But pay no attention to the bullshit alarm. Focus, instead, on the cool and fun story of a guy whose contempt for his fellow man led to a small fortune in the world of television (This part really happened.), astonishing success with women (This part probably happened - I'm told that cocaine is a remarkable drug.), and survival in the deadly world of international espionage (Bullshit!). Sam Rockwell (quickly becoming one of my favorite actors) as Chuck Barris is a hustler born, and watching him hustle his way through life is a great deal of fun. George Clooney does a fine job of making a tiny film seem less tiny through the inclusion of a quality supporting cast - I mean, who else could have gotten Julia Roberts and Drew Barrymore to show up in such a tiny film? And the whole thing hums along in a sort of alcoholic - nihilistic - bullshitter's groove.

I liked it.

The Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSIE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD ("ASSASSINATION," hereafter), is what you get when you put the director of photography in charge of editing. Here's a movie filled with beautiful images that linger, linger, and finally overstay their welcome. ASSASSINATION is an interesting movie. It's a beautiful movie. It could have been a great movie if it had just moved the heck along.

Casey Affleck plays Robert Ford, a man who gives Frank James the creeps just by being around, and who creeps him more the more he is around. Unfortunately, he creeps us out, too, making the seventeen hours the movie spends with the guy remarkably uncomfortable. Robert is, um, fond of Jessie in a creepily warped hero worship / deeply closeted homosexual kind of way. But Robert makes the ultimate mistake for a hero worshipper: he gets too close to the object of his admiration and learns that his hero is just a man, after all.

In the case of Brad Pitt's Jessie James, his hero isn't just a man, but an increasingly unstable psychotic who represents a danger to himself and everyone around him. Hell, by the time Ford takes his shot, it's a no-brainer. And in the moral world of the James gang, a world in which shooting a man in the back is just another day at the office, it makes perfect sense. And that works, and Pitt and Affleck are both quite good (as is the underappreciated Sam Rockwell as Robert's older brother Charley), and everything's fine, but the movie is just so damn slow.

This is a picture whose sunsets seem like they're in real time. Caterpillars mature into butterflies faster than ASSASSINATION moves along. Everything is so stately, so operatic, and for what? The murder of some other murderer? Maybe you have "get" the romance of the James Gang to "get" this movie, but all I saw was a bunch of thugs being led by a charismatic thug who eventually got what was coming to him.

No, thanks.

Galaxy Quest

GALAXY QUEST is one of those movies that never get old. There's always something more to see, and this time around I grooved on the performance of one Alan Rickman.

This guy takes what looks like a simple couple of lines, "By Grabthar's Hammer! What savings!" and turns it into a symphony of self-loathing and resignation. While doing so, he manages to maintain a certain reserve that reminds that, yes, this is supposed to be a comedy. Later, when when he means a "By Grabthar's Hammer!" exclamation, he pours enough real passion into the reading that we, as the audience, buy his character's embrace of, well, his character.

It's great stuff, in a movie full of great stuff. By Grabthar's Hammer, I expect to see this movie over and over again.