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Trespass

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Paul

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Kyle Miller lives in what I imagine was once an Art Deco installation, and does so while looking intriguingly like a cleaned-up Raoul Duke. Even for one of Nicolas Cage’s latter-day exercises in expressionism, that makes for a strange combination. His place in this far-fetched siege drama is to appear like a man who just isn’t going to take it anymore, only to invariably do just that. If his perpetual state of wide-eyed agitation is anything to go by, he has also acquired a rather tremendous coke habit.

Cage is as Cage does then, or, How Joel Schumacher Finally Surpassed Even Batman And Robin. He opens with an aerial shot of a sports car winding its way through the forest. As Kyle drives, he talks with a client on the phone, dazzling him with a mix of cliche and breakneck acumen. The second shot is from inside that artful home, where his wife, Sarah, and daughter Avery argue listlessly about some party or other. Kyle pulls up and doesn’t care to intervene, retiring instead to a home study all the better to project bullshit from. You’ll note, contemptibly, that no one has yet made him as a none-too glorified used car salesman.

Before long, he goes to leave once more. “I wonder how many times this has to happen before I’m not going to care anymore” Sarah sighs, an expensive black dress clinging to her lithe frame. Unbenknownst to them, little Avery is upstairs taking her parents marital strife as the cue to sneak out to that forbidden party. Her departure is a timely one, coming not five minutes before a buzz on the intercom. The mystery callers are begrudging invited into the gated property, though Mummy is too busy pouting by the window to notice her husband being clubbed round the head by a masked gang.

Their balaclavas haphazardly askew, the visitors explain – in what we presume counts as exposition – that the house has been under surveillance for some time, and that they’re here for the family jewels. Kyle desperately wants to pretend like they don’t have any, but he’s about one cold sweat away from leading them to the safe. Which he absolutely will not open. Unless they release his wife, in which case he just might. Only, probably not, since they’ll just kill him if he does. The solution is clear: Kyle must somehow convince the gang to let him broker the sale of his own diamonds, before returning to split the proceeds equally.

So.

Such bumptious behaviour comes at a pace you’d expect from Cage, an actor who trades in the brisk unfathomables. Conceivably, such rapid-fire delivery might have served some bamboozling scheme, except these are no ordinary criminals. More accurately, they’re Joel Schumacher criminals, which makes them special in a purely euphemistic sense. They seem to understand their role is one of stealing something, but can’t quite agree upon what that is, or why. Indeed, their objective (and the means to acquire it) seems to change almost as often as Kyle finds a reason to deny it them.

Don’t be surprised when the tearaway daughter returns home early from her party, because no one else is. She hears her parents desperate pleas to make good her escape, which she naturally takes as an invitation to become another hostage. Thankfully, she’s seated just in time for the beginning of the moody backstory, in which a prior entanglement between Sarah and one of the robbers is revealed in the soft-focus style of an Australian soap – albeit one mired in an elaborate metaphor of the foreclosure crisis, as aided by black-market organs and the irksome curse of myopia.

Trespass is a strange comedy of errors, with its every screw-up taking us further from an already muddled motivation. Were the acting not so atrocious, the occasion so farcical, some semblance of consistency might have made clear what – if anything – was at stake. Without that, all you have are these ridiculous vignettes about whichever shiny object happens to be in frame, stolen for whatever purpose is narratively convenient at the time. A kidney transplant, a maybe maybe-not affair, rope-a-dope villains, and each hostage escaping four or five times a piece. I couldn’t even begin to tell you what happened in the finale. Perhaps the storyboards might help, even if they were drawn in waterproof crayon.

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Waiting for Forever

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Paul

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Will Donner describes life as “starting out with goodness so pure and clear you won’t even know it’s there, because that’s the way it is when you don’t know anything”. The same could be said of cinema: limitless possibility projected out into the theatre before a film becomes what it is. If we’re lucky, it blooms into something close to that romantic ideal. Other times, it becomes Waiting for Forever, and all hope is lost.

Emma and Will were childhood friends until the circumstance of his parents deaths tore them apart. Overnight, their long summers together became letters between sweethearts grown up and apart. She went on to a abusive relationship full of infidelity, living apart from a family she barely recognised. He grew up to be a clown; it’s a funny old world, and so it goes. Less so the story of that boy following his girl across the country, from Massachusetts to California, without so much as a word between them for 20 years. That’s less common. But then, Will isn’t most people.

No, if Will is anything, then I would liken him to a malignancy on the jugular of cinema: an odious void of a man, so intolerably earnest as to recall Jesus incarnate, resurrected this day to walk the streets of downtown Pennsylvania looking for souls to save. He is a cotton-candy clown whose obtuse naiveté (“Everything’s peachy!”) is so insurgent that it would be performance art worthy of Joaquin Phoenix if only the story were to hint at his bearing an affliction of some kind. Since it doesn’t and he isn’t, we’re left to conclude he is this dim-witted by choice, and really are stuck with the gold-hearted doofus for a whole 90 minutes. Heaven help us.

Will hitchhikes back to his childhood home, and along the way enraptures his ride with homespun stories of that sweet girl he lost; how he silently followed her, unable to pluck up the courage to say anything. He confesses to “breathing her in; inhaling her”, so you’ll forgive the elderly Samaritan at the wheel a double-take to check he hasn’t picked up the Perfume murderer. The act doesn’t let up when he reaches his destination either, and no sooner does he arrive home than he cranks up the mugging imbecile act for his brother’s children. A wealthy family man, Jim watches the ensuing performance with a palpable look of disdain. He has little time for Will’s wailsome love quest, and wonders aloud the chances of his securing a job that doesn’t involve farce or balloon animals. Working for an investment bank, you might ask the same of him.

Emma, pretty but dour, is halfway to nowhere in particular by the time we catch up to her. Upon her own arrival back in town, she finds her father suffering from an ailment that is end-stage terminal only when convenient: he’s introduced as being too weak to shift from his slumber, yet finds the energy to not just confront Emma’s knuckleheaded boyfriend, but reduce his own wife to tears in a volley of abuse. Their relationship is volatile to the point of bi-polarity, an incoherent experiment in Cubism that is ridiculous even in written form, so you can well imagine what it’s like in motion. Aaron – the boyfriend – waits downstairs to brood like a man with something to say, but all I could really glean from his chiselled facade is that favourable lighting might have him mistaken for Timothy Olyphant. More than that, I couldn’t fathom.

The two guys make their case for the girl in the middle, and the chips fall where they may. Will’s final plea rests on the notion that he’d rather have a chance of seeing Emma than not: a trite, self-evident truism that tells us everything about a character we cannot understand, refuse to like, and are desperate to leave behind. Writer Steve Adams – whose relation to the late Kurt Vonnegut must be a source of deep shame for the entire family – leaves this coming-of-age tale bereft of anything approaching romance, and plucky Rachel Bilson knows it too: as Emma, she is every bit as withdrawn and colourless as her co-stars, who count Blythe Danner and Richard Jenkins amongst them as the quarrelsome parents unable to imagine what would compel their characters to do anything this story asks of them.

As the unfortunate lead, Tom Sturridge is forced into a self-consciously quirky and unbearable Raymond Babbitt routine here, and for his insufferable turn alone, Waiting for Forever would likely rank amongst the year’s worst. When it’s coupled with endemic condescension, inexplicable motivations and lifeless direction, the only question that remains is whether the same couldn’t apply to just about any year. If these words seem mean-spirited, then they are only the fitting response to a film quite offensively deficient in life, love or interest. I guess you could say I’m feeling pretty fucking peachy about the whole thing.

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Just Go With It

Posted on April 16, 2011 by Paul

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Jennifer Aniston owes her career to the fallacy that you’re only as good as your last movie. A string of box office duds have done little to halt her seemingly unassailable rise to the top of the Hollywood power elite, and her niche as The Successful But Emotionally Needy Rachel Green Girl Next Door shows – at the advanced age of 42 – little sign of being usurped anytime soon.

Just Go With It – largely interchangeable with many of her films – fails on most levels, though to her credit Aniston isn’t one of them. She plays Katherine, a single mother working as an assistant to Danny, who is a successful but juvenile plastic surgeon you’ll recognise as every character Adam Sandler has ever played: goofy, brain-dead and a menace to small children and dogs. His world is one of a rich playboy, trawling bars for women who are susceptible to one of his make-believe sob stories, which range in their details (“My wife beats me”, “I’m lonely on the road”), but are united by one particular: he’s always married. Women, it would seem, are powerless to resist the forbidden charms of a wedding ring.

The film doesn’t yield its Gollum overtones nearly as quickly as you might hope, but things come to a head when he meets the love of his life, Palmer, a suitably voluptuous Brooklyn Decker. She breaks from the script and falls for the real Danny, only to stumble across the dreaded prop in his trouser pocket (alas, not a euphemism). Rather than tell her the truth and risk ruining a good thing, Danny is forced into an increasingly elaborate and costly charade, in which he casts Katherine and her kids as his estranged family. To cement the lie and provide the scriptwriters with a new backdrop to drain of situational comedy, he takes them all on a trip to Hawaii, where – amongst other trivialities – we get gratuitous long-lense shots of Decker in a luscious waterfall paradise I like to call ‘throwing a bone to the guy on a date’.

Based on a film of a Broadway play of a french production, Just Go With It has a lot of inspired lineage for such a crappy movie. Where to begin? Perhaps Katherine’s children, Michael and Maggie (or Bart and Kiki Dee, as they come to be known). Setting aside the question of how a man so well-versed in lying could come up with such an unlikely pair of names, they are the oddest screen children I’ve ever seen. Michael is harmless enough, if invoking a sullen teenage spirit a decade too soon, but Maggie is a genuinely frightening proposition. Whilst possessing all the first principles of childhood innocence, she has been lifted right out of Carrie: for reasons that are largely immaterial, she adopts a faux-Mary Poppins trill throughout and, considering her resolutely fixed grin and dead eyes, I swear I saw her head rotate all the way round one time.

A bigger but less disturbing problem is Sandler himself. This is a man who really possesses but two gears: repressed, angry loner (Punch Drunk Love, Reign Over Me) and fucking cock (everything else). I’ve seen a good number of his 44 movies, and it would be a fair assessment to say 90% of them are irremeable trash, a fate often precipitated by his oafish, simpleton persona that I’m beginning to fear isn’t actually a persona at all. Movies such as this, with their recycled settings and join-the-dots plotlines, live and die on the chemistry and charm of their leads, and though Aniston does her best – eventually – to spark with the gurning primate, Sandler comes up just as wanting as he does in every movie not directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Come the credits, and it was a miracle that Rob Schneider hadn’t made an appearance to unceremoniously smear his balls all over the camera.

The third act of the movie was written long before the setup, and you’ll see it coming all the way from the concession stand. On a night out with archenemy Devlin Adams (a bewildering cameo from Nicole Kidman), Katherine is challenged to say what she loves most about her pretend husband, only to find that her lies reveal a deeper truth. If it helps to set the mood, imagine her looking forlornly at the empty space next to her in bed while the soaring strings of Chasing Cars fade in, because that’s exactly what happens. With Danny due to marry Palmer the very next day, the suspense is palpable, and the complex mystery of who he’ll KATHERINE marry is one I wouldn’t dare spoil.

If Snuffleupagus, hula dance-offs and sex on the beach are your thing, and you just can’t get enough of Adam Sandler being Adam Sandler, then by all means go ahead and rent Just Go With It: he’s technically committed bigger crimes against cinema, and perhaps you fear he might not make rent this month. For the rest of us, our feelings are best summed up by Katherine herself, who likens faking having fun as “a car door slowly shutting on my soul”. Pithy.

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