Tag Archives: Jeff Goldblum

REVIEW: “Mortdecai”

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Life is full of important questions. Does Donald Trump really think his hair looks good? Will Tom Cruise ever age? Do people actually watch “Keeping Up with the Kardashians”? But perhaps the most perplexing question is this – what has happened to Johnny Depp? And to go a bit further, what is driving him to pick such wretched projects these days? Over the years Depp has chosen a wide variety of weird and eccentric roles. But since his last “Pirates” movie, several of his choices have been…well…suspect.

Simply put, “Mortdecai” is his worst yet. It’s an appallingly unfunny action comedy fueled by lazy humor, juvenile gags, and its absurdly creepy main character. The film is based on a book series by English novelist Kyril Bonfiglioli. There were several books in the series which makes me think there was some decent material there. But screenwriter Eric Aronson doesn’t capture anything interesting or entertaining.

Mortdecai (Depp) is a shady art dealer and charlatan who, along with his high maintenance wife JoHanna (Gwyneth Paltrow), is financially strapped due to heavy tax debt. Inspector and old college acquaintance Alistair Martland (Ewan McGregor) comes to Mortdecai to help find a stolen rare Goya painting in exchange for settling his tax debt with the government. Along with his trusted manservant Jock (Paul Bettany), Mortdecai globetrots around the world, encounters a variety of uninteresting people, and faces plenty of dangers. Whatever.

Yep, that's the face you'll have as the final credits roll

Yep, that’s the face you’ll have as the credits roll

I’ve already mentioned how terribly unfunny the film is. You can only handle so much of Depp’s measly voice and bizarre gap-toothed smile. Humor focused on vomit, dry heaving, and body parts gets old quick. It also doesn’t help that the entire stolen painting mystery is sleep-inducing. It’s dull, lifeless, and smothered out by all of the vain attempts at humor. The movie tries to liven things up by injecting a few comedy-laced action sequences, but they are just as uninspired and forgettable.

I feel as though “Mortdecai” revolves around a continuous inside joke that I was never let in on. Surely a comedy can’t be this anemic, lame, and humorless. I sat stone-faced the entire time watching a talented and wasted cast flounder around with some of the worst material of the year. It could be said that this is a new low for Johnny Depp. The guy has talent. We have seen it in the past. But you see none of it in “Mortdecai”. Instead you get Depp at his most annoying and you have to wonder how much more of this nonsense can his career take?

VERDICT – 1 STAR

1 star

REVIEW: “Le Week-End”

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Le_week-end Poster“Le Week-End” was one of my more eagerly anticipated films of the 2014 Spring movie season. My absolute adoration for the city of Paris combined with the intriguing story of a conflicted older couple was enough to get me onboard. This British drama marks the fourth collaboration between director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi. While I’m not familiar with their other collaborative works, there are undeniable signs of quality and brilliance in “Le Week-End” even though the final product isn’t as captivating as I had hoped.

Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan play Nick and Meg Burrows. In light of their 30th wedding anniversary, the couple takes off to Paris, France – the place of their honeymoon. It doesn’t take long for us to see that their marriage is on life support and Nick especially hopes this trip will resuscitate it. Years of pent-up emotion and complex feelings boil to the surface and Nick and Meg try to navigate the waves the best way they know how.

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“Le Week-End” isn’t a formulaic run-of-the-mill couples drama. It has a very grounded sensibility and its approach to storytelling is unique. Much like the struggling relationship it depicts, “Le Week-End” features a number of mood shifts and knotty emotional moments. There is a stinging realism to Nick and Meg’s relationship that separates the film from most other movies of this type. The movie also moves at a fairly slow pace and there are moments where nothing much happens. That’s not always a problem but there are times where it works against the picture.

I can certainly appreciate the deliberate pace and the occasional idling that we get throughout the film. On the other hand, there were times when I really wanted the movie to kick into another gear. The very thing that sets it apart from other movies of this type is the same thing that kept me from truly loving the film. I also left with a number of questions that the ending never answered or hinted at. It’s not that it is a terrible ending, but I can’t say it was all that satisfying.

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I can say that Broadbent and Duncan were extraordinary. Both are seasoned performers and their chemistry is spot-on. The way they develop their characters and expose their flaws and frustrations is nearly flawless. Even when the script shortchanges them (and there are a small handful of weird moments), Broadbent and Duncan rise above the material. I also really liked seeing Jeff Goldblum appear as an old acquaintance of Nick’s. He is a fine actor who I believe always adds good moments to a film.

While “Le Week-End” may not be the brilliant film I was hoping for, it’s still an easy movie to recommend. It makes pretty good use of one of the most beautiful cities in the world and the story of Nick and Meg is certainly an interesting one. But I really hoped that Michell would pull more from this magical setting and that Kureishi would give his performers more fluid material. But even these issues can be overlooked to a degree. “Le Week-End” strives to give us a movie that bucks convention and it puts two truly strong performances in front of us. Those are things I can certainly appreciate.

VERDICT – 3.5 STARS

REVIEW: “The Grand Budapest Hotel”

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Budapest Poster

When Wes Anderson releases a movie it’s almost like an event for me. I’m such a fan of his work and I enjoy each visit I make to his unique and eccentric world. Finally his latest film “The Grand Budapest Hotel” made its way to my area. After a grueling wait the film finally cured my impatience but did it meet my ridiculously high expectations? I’ve come to expect so much from Anderson’s movies and my lofty expectations seem almost unfair. And perhaps those same expectations contributed to my somewhat cold and indifferent reaction to this film.

“The Grand Budapest Hotel” features so many signature trademarks of other Wes Anderson films. We get the quirky period design, an assortment of offbeat characters, a host of stylistic visual flourishes, and a level of expected absurdity. All of those things are present here and they all work to the film’s advantage. These are some of the fingerprints I want to see all over a Wes Anderson movie. But there were other signatures that injects his movies with their own personality and vibrancy that I found missing in this film.

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The story is told in a fractured style but the vast majority of it takes place within a fictitious Eastern European country during 1932. We are introduced to Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), the concierge of The Grand Budapest Hotel during its glory days of luxury and prominence. Gustave is meticulous in his running of the hotel and his love for extravagance is only outdone by his adoration for strong cologne and for his elderly clientele. The story becomes a murder mystery after one of his close acquaintances Madame D (Tilda Swinton) is found dead and Gustave becomes the key suspect. It also becomes a heist film and of course a comedy.

The film is also loaded with a massive number of side characters. Some are like Fiennes and new to Wes Anderson’s world while others are old faithful stalwarts who find their way into nearly every one of his movies. Toni Revolori plays a young lobby boy named Zero who becomes Gustave’s protégé and faithful sidekick. Adrien Brody plays Dmitri, the son of the murdered Madame D. Willem Dafoe plays a grunting snaggletoothed hitman. I could go on and on listing small characters who service the story (some better than others). They are all sprinkled onto stylistic canvases that include an alpine village, a prison, and of course The Grand Budapest itself. There is truly an artistry to the entire visual presentation and all of that worked for me.

But what was it about the film that at first held me at arm’s length? Why didn’t I have the same wonderful experience as I usually have with Wes Anderson pictures during a first viewing? First off I just didn’t find it as funny as I had hoped. Certainly there were moments where I laughed but as a whole the dry humor wasn’t that effective. Even the crowd I watched with had their giggles held to a minimum. This film was also coarse and crasser than most of Anderson’s other pictures. Much of it is played for laughs but I found it to be distracting and it felt as though Anderson, normally known for his creative freedom, was really stretching.

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Another missing component for me was the deeper emotional thread that every Anderson film has had. For example in “The Royal Tenenbaums” you have the destructive results that a father’s behavior has had on his family. In “The Darjeeling Limited” you have three separated brothers each carrying the baggage of their father’s death. “Moonrise Kingdom” features two kids with no stable adult presence in their lives. They find their refuge by running away together. The same thing applies to “Rushmore” and “The Fantastic Mr. Fox”. Anderson has always had a knack for presenting a deeper and more piercing subject and effectively surrounding it with humor. Every sense of that is vague and almost absent from this entire film. He does tinker with a few themes via the impending war that lingers in the background, the desires for the nostalgic “better days”, etc. But none of these stood out to me at all.

This is the first screenplay that Anderson has written by himself. Does that play into the things I found lacking? I don’t know, perhaps. Anderson is also often accused of going overboard with his eccentric style. I’ve never found any merit to that accusation but this is the first film where there just might be. Could that be linked to Anderson’s solo screenplay? Again, I don’t know. What I do know is that there were parts of this film that really worked and after a second viewing I definitely began to appreciate the film more. At first “The Grand Budapest Hotel” didn’t fully work for me. It definitely comes more into focus the more times you see it.

VERDICT – 4 STARS