Four Mini-Reviews

Below are capsule reviews for four movies I didn’t get around to writing about during the year.

The Captive—Ryan Reynolds (who’s admittedly very good) plays a beleaguered father whose young daughter vanishes without a trace. The police suspect him, but actually she’s been kidnapped by an ultra-creepy predator who’s part of a network of child abusers. In its own way, The Captive works. It’s effective, but it’s probably the most unpleasant movie experience of the year, particularly because of the absolute misery the film puts its characters through. Rosario Dawson plays a detective who specializes in finding predators. (Her character is put into a ludicrous situation that hampers the film’s credibility.) With Scott Speedman, Mirielle Enos, and Kevin Durand. Written by the director, Atom Egoyan, and David Fraser.

Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me—Equal parts maudlin and amusing, this documentary about the blowsy comedian is interesting and yet, it’s kind of depressing to see old celebrities having to essentially whore themselves out in order to make ends meet. (It’s not unlike the Joan Rivers doc from a few years ago.)

The Heart Machine—A dull indie drama about a man whose girlfriend—whom he meets online—may be putting one over on him. He believes her to be living in Germany on a writing fellowship, but then he sees a girl who looks just like her on the subway one day. Is she a doppelganger or is his girlfriend lying to him? The film isn’t nearly as interesting as its premise.

The LEGO Movie—I just wanted it to end.

Top Five

Hollywood loves movies about itself, which explains part of the current fascination with the overrated Birdman. But there’s another film out this year about the industry that is better than Birdman, although unlikely to get as much praise: Chris Rock’s latest triple-threat effort, Top Five. It’s a welcome addition to the usual self-important prestige pictures that bombard movie-goers at the end of the year. Top Five is funny, bold, even inventive at times, and it gets better as it goes along.

The story feels all too realistic: Chris Rock plays Andre Allen, a comedian-turned-movie-star whose biggest movie role was that of a giant bear named “Hammy” in three extremely lucrative Hammy the Bear movies. But Andre doesn’t feel funny anymore. The glitter has worn off his star. He’s battled alcoholism, faced a downward turn in his career, and is engaged to a reality TV star (played by Gabrielle Union) whom he doesn’t really like that much. Andre’s latest movie, Uprize, is a personal labor of love about Haitian slaves revolting against their white slave-owners. But his wedding is getting more press, and the movie is being virtually ignored at the box office. Top Five takes place in one day as Allen travels all over New York City doing press for Uprize while a writer for the New York Times named Chelsea Brown (Rosario Dawson) tags along with him so she can write a piece about his career. As they wander the city together, their conversations take on an increasingly honest and personal tone. (Both actors give fine performances.)

The first thirty minutes of Top Five didn’t strike me as all that funny, although the opening dialogue between Rock and Dawson, in which they argue back and forth about the degree of progress minorities have made in the United States—which serves as a kind of prelude to the movie—was fresh and funny. That chunk of the film felt a bit uninvolved, like a stand-up comedian who hasn’t quite warmed up yet. But then the movie does warm up, and once Top Five gains its momentum, the movie is often uproariously funny and dead-on in its frank discussion of a variety of issues. It’s been a while since a movie so deftly and loosely talked about the politics of race and gender and stardom and fame all at once (without getting lost in the fray). We see Andre Allen as a real person who lives in that weird fame bubble in which he’s  living a seemingly charmed life. But in another very different sense, he’s trapped by the often insipid demands of the public who just want one more “Hammy’ movie, and trapped into indifference to the world around him, which seems to have gone madder by the minute. He’s still stinging from insults made by thoughtless critics, he’s suspicious of so-called racial progress, and he wants desperately to be taken seriously.

What distinguishes Top Five from most of the other comedies this year (except the other racially-themed comedy I saw, Dear White People), is that it knows how to be cinematic. Most comedies tend to veer into the realm of the sitcom in that they focus on thin set-ups and lots of gags. But Chris Rock’s film takes time to develop its characters into real human beings, and lets the humor grow within that framework. He’s smart enough to focus on things he knows a lot about, and thus creates a refreshingly honest and surprising and funny movie. He also lets Rosario Dawson go head to head with him, and she’s more than a worthy opponent.

The film has several terrific set pieces. Andre recounts with horror a disastrous night in Houston, ten years earlier, when he hit rock bottom in his personal life. (That scene, among others, will probably deter any viewers who find crude humor offensive.) Rosario Dawson’s character, Chelsea, later serves up her own horrifyingly funny tale about her boyfriend (played by Anders Holm of TV’s Workaholics). I won’t spoil either of these scenes because they’re absolutely hysterical. But believe me, if you are turned off by gross humor, these scenes alone are reason enough to avoid the film. But it’s a rewarding movie, and it manages to find a real sense of truth within the comedy, and a real humanity within its study of the nature of fame. 

With Kevin Hart, J.B. Smoove (as Andre’s bodyguard), Sherri Shepherd, Tracy Morgan, Romany Malco, Hayley Marie Norman, Anders Holm, and in cameo performances as themselves: Jerry Seinfeld, Whoopi Goldberg, and Adam Sandler.  Written and directed by Chris Rock.

Trance

Danny Boyle's Trance is like Inception meets Headhunters (the Norwegian film about a professional art thief who steals a priceless painting from a professional killer). In it, an art auctioneer (James McAvoy) tries to double-cross his partners during a heist, and winds up in the hospital after being hit hard on the head. When he wakes up he can't remember what he did with the painting (a Rembrandt, no less), and his partners-in-crime are furious and ready to kill him. He goes to a professional hypnotist (Rosario Dawson) to try and recover his memory and retrieve the painting. But that's only the beginning. What unfolds is a perplexing labyrinth of "who's playing whom?" type games.

You will likely find yourself being pulled into this murky yet lithe, enticing thriller against your will. The script by Joe Ahearne and John Hodge thrives on keeping the audience in the dark, and Boyle doesn't seem to mind this a bit: we're never able to trust where it's all going, and much of the plot seems unnecessary except that we're counting on some big twist at the end to suddenly connect all the seemingly loose threads to each other. It may help the viewer to know that this does happen, but only at the end, and I did spend much of the time frustrated that there would be no relief to this deliberately complicated movie.

The saving grace of Trance is that, pointless as some of its story developments seem, it's a very entertaining movie. It's like chewing bubblegum and not knowing how long the sweetness will last. But you're content while it does, and it provides enough of the sensations promised to justify its existence. The casting is very good too: McAvoy convinces as the somewhat pathetic auctioneer whose life is in jeopardy; Vincent Cassel makes for both an intimidating and suave mastermind with Danny Sapani, Matt Cross, and Wahab Skeikh playing his cohorts, and Rosario Dawson exudes a kind of sexy control over all the male characters.

The questions Trance raises about our very unreliable memories are probably the most fascinating thing about the movie. These have been asked before, perhaps most recently in Inception (and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). But Trance goes the route of science rather than dreams, allowing that the right person with the right training and knowledge can erase someone's memory or help him recall it, and this proves to be a site of anxiety for the movie to exploit. After all, much of if not all of one's identity ultimately finds its grounding in memory and the idea that we are free agents who do things which become indelibly etched into the past, our past. Our memories prove that we have lived. McAvoy's character becomes helpless because of his inability to remember the crucial piece of information--where he put the damned painting--and Dawson becomes a sort of memory shaman.

Trance has a preposterous "what-the-hell" quality that simultaneously puts it in the ranks of the purely entertaining thriller and the purely ridiculous one, depending on the moment. But it's exciting and fun despite (or perhaps because of) its mock-cleverness, which makes it a very hard movie to resist. 101 min. ★★★