Bridesmaids

As I was sitting in the theater howling at the insanely funny Kristen Wiig in the new comic tour de force Bridesmaids, I started thinking about movies where the main character is an underdog who can do no right, and how movies with such characters tend to milk our sympathy--even subconsciously invoking our self-pity as though pulling the strings of our emotions without our consent. I thought of that poor schmuck in Meet the Parents, and how, by the end of the movie, I wanted him to leave those people behind and never speak to them again. I felt the same way for Kristen Wiig's character, for a while, but the beauty of Bridesmaids is that it doesn't let you completely lapse into a pity party for her character. It's not like the horrendously unfunny You Again, which was pure lazy indulgence. In Bridesmaids we are not just feeling the gut punches to Wiig's character, we're also receiving the pride-diminishing life lesson that, eventually, you have to stop playing the victim and take control of your own life.

Bridesmaids' plot operates in a mostly standard fashion: chronic failure Annie (Wiig) must compete with elegant, snotty, rich Helen (Rose Byrne) as she takes on the duty of being the maid of honor for her best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph). We identify with Annie right away, even though Helen isn't a complete bitch. She's close, but the movie isn't going to let us hate her with impunity.

In fact, the complexity of these women and their relationships is what gives Bridesmaids such personality. Besides that, director Paul Feig doesn't rush the humor. He knows how talented the cast is, and he lets them take time building the jokes to a crescendo. You laugh so much you'll miss half the gags, but what's going on visually is just as funny as what's being said, so you eventually become exhausted because you're laughing so much of the time. Bridesmaids is like a really good mixed drink and a really crude joke combined. The crudeness goes down easier because of the buzz you're feeling--as well as the sweetness, which isn't saccharine but genuine sugar.

I enjoyed the predictable relationship developing between Annie and a likable Irish cop, played by Chris O'Dowd. And Melissa McCarthy stole every scene she was in as the bride's sister-in-law to-be, a plump, plucky, and socially awkward self-made woman whose eccentric personality seems to render her oblivious to the drama that's unfolding between the other women. Wendi McLendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper round out the group of bridesmiads (the first one is a discontented housewife and mother of three, and the second a dreamy-eyed newlywed who's obsessed with Disney World and domestic life).

Wiig's comic timing is impeccable. She reminds me of Tina Fey, but with a dose of Goldie Hawn. She's utterly likable even when she's being stubborn, and her humor is genuine. There's something so natural and unforced about her performance. She seems to be having a wonderful time with Rudolph, who projects her own comic radiance while playing the straight gal. Byrne is wonderful too as the spoiled rich thing with a heart of platinum. With Jon Hamm as Annie's insignificant other and the late Jill Clayburgh as her mom. Written by Annie Mumolo and Kristin Wiig.

Howl

I like James Franco because he makes interesting career choices. I won't say his choice to do General Hospital last year was daring, or provocative, or interesting, but it's refreshing to see an actor doing what he wants to do. On the other hand, Franco's newest movie, Howl, is kind of daring. Howl is about Allen Ginsberg and his phantasmagorical poem ("Howl"), which was accused of being obscene.

The movie traces the trial in which David Strathairn and Jon Hamm face off as lawyers on opposite sides of the case, while a cartoonish-looking Bob Balaban sits sternly at the bench with his gavel. Interspersed with the courtroom drama story, which is the most mainstream thing about Howl, are scenes of Franco as Ginsberg, being interviewed by an unknown person, talking about his writing style, his thoughts on art and the creative process, his homosexuality, his relationships, and his mother, who died after she underwent a lobotomy.

The standout in Howl is the animation: a visual representation of Ginsberg's poem, which is the third part of Howl's intercutting story. It's vividly mad and madly vivid, a fascinating realization of Ginsberg's rambling, chaotic, sensual style. Such an ambitious attempt at uniting poetry and film makes Howl worth seeing, although it's probably not going to find much of an audience. It's more of a documentary than a piece of narrative, and the courtroom drama section of the movie is, despite being the most traditionally dramatic aspect of the movie, not the emotional center of the film. Is it an attempt to ingratiate the movie's form with mainstream audiences? I'm not sure, but I think it does provide a bit of respite from the trippy animated scenes and the scenes where Ginsberg talks to the camera like it's his shrink. Franco has a sort of droll, blase way of reading the poem (and speaking in general) that is charged with an energy that comes from his chest and seems to force its way out of him. His voice is a strange combination of lethargy and passion: he's like a stoner who's simultaneously mellow and unhinged.

Jon Hamm and David Strathairn don't really have much to do other than defend their side of the "obscenity in literature" argument, and while they are good actors who do convincing work, it's not very challenging work. Hamm is easy to like, so of course it's not hard to put him on the side of open-mindedness, and Strathairn does a good job playing the stuffy, wormy conservative villain who wants to outlaw what he doesn't understand. The judge's decision isn't really very momentous, but then we're left with the impression that this was never the point of Howl. Instead, it seems more an attempt to give a voice to someone who had trouble being understood but struck a chord with his incoherency. Ginsberg's poetry has been compared to jazz in its rhythm and its style, and indeed it seems like linguistic jazz--seemingly unstructured and unpredictable, going against the rules of form and style, but penetrating the senses with its dark, deep and fluid imagery.

Directed and written by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. With Jeff Daniels, Mary-Louise Parker, Treat Williams, and Alessandro Nivola. ★★½

The Town

The Town is the kind of intense, gritty cops-and-robbers drama that has flooded television networks, but because of its ballsy, brassy energy, it commands our attention more than something we might catch while flipping channels. Here was I, so eager to banish Ben Affleck to that circle of hell reserved for actors who make movies like Gigli, and then he comes along with The Town. It's not the kind of movie for needless hyperbole. It's simply a gripping movie that succeeds in getting us to feel sympathy for the bad guys. There's never a moment when we want the main character, Doug McCray (Affleck, who also directed and co-wrote), to get caught by the relentless FBI agent (Jon Hamm) who's determined to see him die in prison.

When McCray develops a romantic relationship with a former hostage (Rebecca Hall), he decides to give up the dangerous criminal life he's led for so long. But walking away from a career of bank robbing isn't easy when there are other parties involved. The conflict isn't very original, but fresh-faced Hall makes it believable that McCray would want to leave his criminal life behind. Jeremy Renner, who turned in such a strong lead performance in The Hurt Locker, commands the screen in every scene he's in as one of McCray's cohorts, the one who's unhinged and trigger happy (partly because he's served nine years of his life in prison).

The movie is surprisingly funny even in the midst of the most horrific circumstances. Renner has the look of a mad genius, and Affleck is cocky but cool: he always has one more trick up his sleeve and is bolstered by a unique ability to keep calm in any event. Hamm, who doesn't take any crap from anybody, has a natural light-heartedness (seen more fully in his 30 Rock appearances) that mixes unexpectedly with his stern good looks.  Also starring Blake Lively, Owen Burke, Pete Postlewaite, and Chris Cooper. ★★★

The A-Team

The A-Team is a surprisingly fun and exciting update of the 1980s television show. Four rogue army rangers (Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Quinton Jackson, and Sharlto Copley) band together against a plot to make billions of dollars in counterfeit bills with U.S. currency plates, stolen by the Iraqis but now in the hands of corrupt CIA personnel. A self-serious action movie can be deadly, and it's the overarching sense of humor that gives The A-Team life and allows the audience to enjoy it.

There are two interesting questions worth exploring with The A-Team movie. First, how ironic is a movie about a plot to counterfeit U.S. money when in real life the dollar is declining in value with every passing year/month/week/day? Second, how much do we really buy/respect women in positions of power? Jessica Biel plays a tough and confident military captain at odds with the A-Team until she finds out they're good. She has an important job where she makes life and death decisions. Do we as an audience believe she can pull this off? Obviously, choosing the right actress was key in making her character strong and convincing. I think Biel as a casting choice worked well.

The standout in this film was Patrick Wilson as CIA agent Lynch. Wilson has really done well in a wide variety of films, from the musical (The Phantom of the Opera in 2004) to the drama (Little Children, 2006) to the magnormous graphic-novel-come-to-life (Watchmen, 2009). His character starts off as sort of forgettable, but as he becomes more integral to the story, Wilson displays a wonderfully comic attitude that makes him likable even when he's not supposed to be. ★★★

A Single Man

In A Single Man, Colin Firth is George Falconer, a 50-something English professor living in L.A. (although he's a native of England) in 1962. Since the death of his lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), George wakes up, he gets dressed, he goes to work, he comes home, and everything in between is so painfully contrived that he operates more like a machine than a man. Still, there are glimmers of life amidst his cookie cutter existence. 

Living in a Leave it to Beaver-style neighborhood, George chafes against the provincialism of his surroundings and maintains a faux-sophisticated relationship with his old chum Charley (Julianne Moore), also English, the two of them isolated expatriates, unsure of their roots anymore. George is cynical, Charley pretends not to be, and the gin flows freely in their tumultuous meeting that night (this story unfolds in the course of one 24-hour-period, with flashbacks of George's former life with Jim). Charley is George's only friend, and yet there's a distance between them that George maintains. She was the one, however, that he went to the night he received word that Jim had died in Michigan in a car accident (and that he wasn't welcome at Jim's funeral).

George approaches this day with a new-found determination. He's going to kill himself.

Tom Ford, who started out his career as a production designer, makes his directing debut with A Single Man, which spends so much time in close-up that we practically become experts of the actors' pores. It's a glossy affair, one that seems at times like postcards extracted from the early 60s, and at other times recalls the sumptuous intensity of a 1950's soaper, not unlike an earlier film starring Julianne Moore (Far From Heaven). 

Christopher Isherwood's book, though very literate, is also inherently cinematic in the way it unfolds, and so the task of screenwriter David Scearce isn't one of selecting and arranging but of heightening the dramatic appeal. There hasn't been a movie this visually opulent for a long while, and I think we can attest to Ford's prowess as a production designer that the movie looks so good, and not just good, but seamlessly rich in detail; at times it appears pretentious, but there's such a thread of humor about the whole production that it takes the wind out of the deliberately high drama.

The performance by Colin Firth is top notch, somewhat reminiscent of Laurence Olivier, but then this is the kind of part that seems almost too obviously geared toward winning an award. And yet Firth does it justice, maintaining the clinched, formal composure that offsets the visual razzle-dazzle. There's a lot of Vertigo in this movie, particularly in the music score by Abel Korzeniowski, as well as the voyeuristic approach Ford and cinematographer Eduard Grau take to the movie. There are constant close-ups of lips and eyes and legs and backs and bodies floating in the water...it's very European without losing its Hollywood-ness.

A Single Man isn't for every taste, but it deserves much praise for what it does well and what it doesn't do. Its deadly serious subject matter could have been a lot heavier and therefore a lot grimmer if not for the humor and the visual largesse that constantly reminds us we're watching a movie. ★★★