Category Archives: Reviews

Netflix’s ‘Confidential’ Doldrums

(AP)

Netflix must be pretty depressed about the Oscars. After two high-profile, big-budget attempts at a Best Picture Academy Award, Netflix apparently decided to flush its money down the toilet in a petulant rage.

Time was, Netflix put out a healthy dose of dramatic gems, from The Irishman to Roma to The Two Popes to Wedding Story, all of which got Oscar’s attention, if not gold.Image result for roma

In response, we’ve been gift-wrapped turds for 2020 like The Last Thing He Wanted (which was probably this movie. The latest is Spenser Confidential, another film with a big star and a tiny punch. While it’s less fecal-dipped than Ben Affleck’s Wanted, it’s hardly a coil above. Hopefully, the streaming service is jettisoning excess gas before landing this coming award season.

It’s back to Boston for Mark Wahlberg in Spenser, so you know what that inevitably means, right?

There’s eventually going to have to be a fight with dirty cops in an Irish bar — sorry, it’s pronounced “bah” — while the Red Sox are playing on TV. Those are the rules.

Sure enough, the bar brawl arrives 30 minutes into this meandering film that tries to piggyback on the good will created by novelist Robert B. Parker’s wisecracking boxer-turned-private eye Spenser, played on TV by Robert Urich.Image result for spenser robert urich

Spenser Confidential  is a bit of a mess tonally with a plot that keeps attracting new weird layers, like lint on a sweater. It wants to be funnier than it is. It hopes to be deeper than it is.

Wahlberg as Spenser is an ex-con and an ex-police officer who gets out of prison only to stumble into a conspiracy that includes crooked cops, Dominican street gangs armed with machetes and dirty business investors pursuing gentrification and gambling. How high does it go? “High up,” he learns.

If there’s a Spenser, there has to be his buddy Hawk, and this role is filled awkwardly by Winston Duke. He’s a fine actor but screenwriters Sean O’Keefe and Brian Helgeland haven’t really integrated him well, making Hawk into Spenser’s roommate, an oat milk drinking, MMA fighter who adores animals.Image result for spenser Winston Duke

This Spenser is such a good guy that even one of his enemies calls him a “choir boy.” Just ask his ex-girlfriend (Iliza Shlesinger), who has a love-hate relationship with him but admires his “strong moral code” even though she tells him: “You are incapable of real intimacy.” Contradicting herself sometime later, she screams “Go, Sox!” during sex with him, which is the most Boston thing to do.

Spenser was only sent to prison because he beat up his crooked police chief, who was, in turn, beating up his wife. He comes out of prison and immediately the chief is killed gruesomely. Spenser sticks his neck out to clear the name of a cop who has been framed for the murder. “Why are you doing this?” the widow asks Spenser. “Because it’s the right thing to do,” our good guy replies.

Like a stage musical that is propelled by its songs, this film moves thanks to its frequent violent outbursts. Director Peter Berg evenly spaces out the fight scenes so you can tell one is coming every 10 or 15 minutes. “Man, you get beat up a lot,” Hawk tells Spenser. (Everyone in this Boston seems to be a member of a boxing gym.)

In between the fights, Spenser Confidential reaches for film noir, like a Chinatown in Beantown (one character even has a toothpick sticking out of his mouth at all times). Sometimes it tries be a Dirty Harry movie or to ape the dark feel of Gone Baby Gone. Other times it tries to be a buddy comedy but with few actual laughs, unless you consider the line “Did you just kick me, bro?” funny.

Berg and Wahlberg have previously worked together on Lone Survivor, Patriots Day and Deepwater Horizon. Playing a renegade good guy is right up Wahlberg’s alley and to say he sleepwalks down that alley this time isn’t too harsh. On the positive side, some nifty acting turns are offered from Post Malone and Marc Maron.Image result for Lone Survivor, Patriots Day and Deepwater Horizon

But there are some head-scratching moments, including a man-versus-dog fight that serves no purpose and an attempt to reach for a sequel when the first one hasn’t been earned. And why does Spenser sometimes write down all his clues, pointlessly circling and underlining words on a notepad like “Why?”

It’s not even clear why the film is called Spenser Confidential. There’s nothing hush-hush about it except this: Everyone associated with the film might want to keep that to themselves.

 

Hollywood’s Villainy Problem

Image result for hollywood villains

 

Hollywood has always struggled with diarrhea of the mouth. It can’t help but spew forth when it gets excited. Trailers give away the entire movie. Sequels dwarf originals. A comic-book film works? Clone away! A star is trending on social media? Put star in everything. Image result for adam driver

One of its golden rules, however, used to be: Never give away the ending. Remember when people were shocked that Bruce Willis was a ghost in The Sixth Sense? Or that the heroine in The Crying Game was actually the hero? Oh yeah, spoiler warning. Secrets were easier to keep before the internet, but, even now, studios request that reviewers not post spoilers on social media outlets.

But leave it to Tinseltown to burn the tinsel down. Last week, Rian Johnson, the director of the whodunit  Knives Out, recently sat down for an interview with Vanity Fair to break down a scene from the film. During it, he revealed that Apple, a sponsor of the film, doesn’t allow “bad guys” to have an Iphone on screen. As part of Apple’s guidelines, the company confirmed, third parties can only show their products “in the best light” and “in a manner or context that reflects favorably” on the company.Image result for knives out

Well, there goes your whodunnit.

Corporations have always flexed Darwinian dominance on celluloid. Ever seen James Bond in a smashed-to-hell Aston Martin? Or Tom Cruise  in a dented BMW? Or a hero whose Ferrari isn’t spit-polish clean? Exclusive car manufacturers have their own usage guideline, the underpinning one being: “Don’t make our cars look like shit.”Image result for james bond in car

But that didn’t affect a movie’s plot.  We already know James Bond isn’t going to die in any spy installment. That the man’s wheels are as polished as the man is no great stretch.

But Apple’s villainy clause underscores Hollywood’s villainy problem. The Usual Suspects, for instance, would not exist, or require Keiser Soze to use a Tracfone or some other cheap 7-Eleven burner. And you know Kaiser don’t Android. Cell phones played a key role in The Departed. Would  the studio have insisted on those old brick handsets?Image result for keiser soze

While the Apple disclosure isn’t going to send shock waves through the industry (Netflix and Amazon do that), it does underscore a larger problem the film industry faces in portraying bad guys.

Time was, studios would appoint villains the nationalities of any countries we saw on the battlefield. Native Americans. Asians. Germans.

In the 70’s, Hollywood took a bad-guy-bead on nationalities. Black and Hispanic actors, in particular, were easy, disenfranchised foible fodder. Clint Eastwood built his legend on challenging minorities to bullet counts.Image result for dirty harry and criminal

In today’s online, social justice frontier, however, there are fewer choices of folks to vilify. The Hunt, a violent human prey film from Blumhouse pictures, was delayed for months because protesters saw it as a political screed against political correctness. It was quietly re-edited and will be released next week.Image result for the hunt

So who’s left? Pederasts and serial killers are usually a safe bet — just be careful the color and gender you choose for the antagonist. Aliens are a pretty safe bet, as long as you make it clear we’re talking about space aliens.

I’m sure Hollywood will think of something. Who knows? Sometimes, they’re even in your own backyard. Image result for harvey weinstein

 

‘The Last Thing He Wanted’ Will Become Yours, Too

Image result for the last thing he wanted

(AP)

Not too deep into the Netflix film The Last Thing He Wanted, the spunky heroine is given a warning: “Buckle up. It’s gonna be bananas!”

It’s advice that checks out. It’s definitely bananas, but not those fancy, ripe, yellow ones Cheetah gets at Tarzan & Jane’s jungle soirees. These are more the splotchy, half-decomposed bananas with those  cancerous brown chunks throughout of the fruit.

Director Dee Rees has stumbled badly with her adaptation of Joan Didion’s novel of the same name, creating a messy, disorientating and meandering film. It’s the last thing we wanted.

Rees, who helmed Mudbound to acclaim, directs and co-writes the screenplay with Marco Villalobos and they clearly admire the novel. That leads to pointless scenes, too many minor characters and a lack of precision. For a thriller, there’s also an alarming lack of thrills. So often this films feels like a balloon repeatedly blown up and then just as soon deflated.Image result for mudbound

(Mudbound)

Viewers might need to do some homework beforehand and get familiar with Nicaragua in the 1980s. Knowing who the Sandinistas and Contras are is crucial. Being patient with lots of cryptic geopolitical conversations is also a plus. This isn’t based on a true story, but then we oddly get a portrayal of former Secretary of State George P. Shultz. (Look away, Shultz fans. It isn’t pretty.)Image result for george p shultz

The movie stars Anne Hathaway as the middle-aged woman at the heart of the book. Hathaway’s Elena McMahon has walked out of her life. Actually she does it twice. We meet her as a hard-nosed journalist who has already fled a cossetted existence and wealthy husband. Then we see her flee that high-flying career in order to aid her ailing dad.

Dad (Willem Dafoe, terrific) is a curmudgeonly arms dealer who has manged to arrange one last exchange which will net him $1 million, a lot in the mid-80s. But his memory is failing and he gets confused so he asks his daughter to fill in for him. So that’s how we get Elena in a cocktail dress standing on a remote airstrip in Nicaragua with cases of guns, bullets and land mines.Image result for the last thing he wanted willem dafoe

Somehow the irony of this situation isn’t fully explored. Here we have a righteous journalist who just a few minutes before was declaring “We can’t just look away!” about Central American atrocities who’s now smuggling in the exact weapons fueling the violence. But Elena is moving too quickly to think about it — she’s fallen deep into a twisty conspiracy wrapped in an enigma hidden in a lousy script.

Somewhere in the film is a lesson about corruption of the soul or the venality of nations. But “ The Last Thing He Wanted ” is both too small and too large, unable to tell the whole story of the U.S. meddling in Central America and yet unable to really tell the story of one woman, either.

There are moments when Hathaway really reveals a hurt deep inside — a scene in which she opens her dad’s empty fridge is deeply affecting — but the individual scenes don’t add up to a real portrait. The film also stars Ben Affleck as a shadowy figure and he has decided that being quiet and blank is the best option here, except for a scene in which he eats pie with Shultz, which is just bizarre. There is criminally too little Rosie Perez as well.Image result for the last thing he wanted hathaway affleck

The first half doesn’t fit with the second half, there are too many distractions and the filmmakers think it’s clever to leave clues but they do it clumsily and at the last minute and it’s really exhausting for the viewer. There’s a whiff of The Year of Living Dangerously, a little Air America and even some of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.

But whiffs aren’t enough. Ultimately, Last Thing is a banana peel on which everyone has slipped.