Everybody wants Atticus Finch until there’s a dead hooker in the bathtub.

The Judge

(2014)

(SPOILERS) Robert Downey Jr.’s non-Iron Man, non-Sherlock Holmes self-produced vanity project took a tumble at about this time last year. It probably left a few studio suits scratching their heads. This was the star in his cocky element (unlike Due Date), playing off one of cinema’s great actors (Robert Duvall), playing in a reliable genre staple (the courtroom drama). It isn’t so mystifying on actually watching the thing. The Judge is bloated, unfocused and manages to coddle the viewer with clichés while simultaneously inserting material if thinks might be a little edgy (but really isn’t).

Actually, scratch that. I was genuinely surprised by the scene in which Downey’s Hank Palmer must avoid slipping over in his ailing father Joseph’s (Duvall) shit, and then proceeds to help him clean himself up. This in a picture that is otherwise so shamelessly glossy and textbook in the narrative points it hits.

Warner Bros must be thanking their lucky stars that David Dobkin’s Arthur and Lancelot never went into production. Dobkin’s fine as an anonymous comedy guy (well… he is responsible for Fred Claus) but only Downey Jr. knows why he was thought to have the chops for a serious drama. His approach seems to be marbling the picture in Janusz Kaminski’s lush visuals (that light flooding the courtroom though; sheesh!) and allowing Thomas Newman to smother it with an emotionally tugging but banal score. Mostly the picture just meanders, never able to gather steam on a course that is constantly checking itself; is this a family saga, a romance, a murder mystery? There’s even a smattering of ill-advised adult humour as Hank frets over whether the young woman he copped off with when he got to town is in fact his daughter (it’s okay, she’s only his niece! But he’s still not telling his ex).

I think I had in mind Downey Jr. attempting to do a proper courtroom drama when I heard about the picture, à la The Verdict, but every element of Hank’s journey is tired and familiar. He’s that heartless rich lawyer without a shred of moral fibre (“And how does it feel, Hank, knowing every person you represent is guilty?”: “It’s fine. Innocent people can’t afford me”), a guy who pisses on an opposing prosecuting attorney’s shoes in the first scene, who is splitting up with his pert wife and is estranged from his curmudgeonly father. Don’t worry, though. He adores his daughter, so we know it will all work out fine in the end.

Just because material is familiar, doesn’t mean it can’t be fruitful; the rich city guy returning to the small town of his birth and rediscovering himself is evergreen in potential. It’s mostly squandered here, though. The obligatory old flame, as personified by the wonderful but underused Vera Farmiga, adds little to the proceedings other than expanding the running time unnecessarily to the two-and-a-quarter hour mark (this is where the Downey vanity vehicle bit comes in; it has to cater for any emotion he wishes to explore herein, including showing his abs).

There’s the crafty prosecutor (Billy Bob Thornton, running on autopilot, but who can blame him), the inexperienced defender (Dax Shepard, decent but doing his well-meaning doofus shtick) and the brothers; could’ve-been-a-ballplayer-if-not-for-Hank’s-dark-past (Vincent D’Onofrio, doing the nice guy) and learning disabled filmmaker Hank stands rock solid by (Jeremy Strong). The latter’s facility leads to overcooked nostalgia trip home movies.

The trial revolves around whether Joseph, on the night after burying his wife, ran down and killed a man he regretted letting off lightly 20 years earlier (who subsequently got out of prison and killed his girlfriend). None of the twists are sufficiently dramatic (it’s patently obvious Joseph hasn’t started on the booze again, and is ill when he forgets someone’s name, rather undermining Hank’s shit-hot credentials), and Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque’s screenplay even resorts to a big emotional bonding moment mid-trial as Joseph reveals just how much he loved his wayward son despite it all.

The Judge lacks balls. To paraphrase a question Hank asks his brothers, what line was Dobkin in when they were distributing testicles? He’s content to imbue the movie with a superficial veneer, only occasionally punctured by its stars, because that’s the only kind of movie he seems comfortable making. This is a picture with so little real inspiration, when it comes across a good line it has to put quotation marks around it (“Everybody wants Atticus Finch until there’s a dead hooker in the bathtub”). Downey Jr. is very much not stretching himself here, but he’s reliable, and he’s more than up to playing a scene opposite Duvall, who is the (only) real reason to see this.

Your Mickey Mouse is one big stupid dope!

Enemy Mine (1985) (SPOILERS) The essential dynamic of Enemy Mine – sworn enemies overcome their differences to become firm friends – was a well-ploughed one when it was made, such that it led to TV Tropes assuming, since edited, that it took its title from an existing phrase (Barry Longyear, author of the 1979 novella, made it up, inspired by the 1961 David Niven film The Best of Enemies ). The Film Yearbook Volume 5 opined that that Wolfgang Petersen’s picture “ lacks the gritty sauciness of Hell in the Pacific”; John Boorman’s WWII film stranded Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune on a desert island and had them first duking it out before becoming reluctant bedfellows. Perhaps germanely, both movies were box office flops.

If I do nothing else, I will convince them that Herbert Stempel knows what won the goddam Academy Award for Best goddam Picture of 1955. That’s what I’m going to accomplish.

Quiz Show (1994) (SPOILERS) Quiz Show perfectly encapsulates a certain brand of Best Picture nominee: the staid, respectable, diligent historical episode, a morality tale in response to which the Academy can nod their heads approvingly and discerningly, feeding as it does their own vainglorious self-image about how times and attitudes have changed, in part thanks to their own virtuousness. Robert Redford’s film about the 1950s Twenty-One quiz show scandals is immaculately made, boasts a notable cast and is guided by a strong screenplay from Paul Attanasio (who, on television, had just created the seminal Homicide: Life on the Streets ), but it lacks that something extra that pushes it into truly memorable territory.

Other monks will meet their deaths here. And they too will have blackened fingers. And blackened tongues.

The Name of the Rose (1986) (SPOILERS) Umberto Eco wasn’t awfully impressed by Jean Jacques-Annaud’s adaptation of his novel – or “ palimpsest of Umberto Eco’s novel ” as the opening titles announce – to the extent that he nixed further movie versions of his work. Later, he amended that view, calling it “ a nice movie ”. He also, for balance, labelled The Name of the Rose his worst novel – “ I hate this book and I hope you hate it too ”. Essentially, he was begrudging its renown at the expense of his later “ superior ” novels. I didn’t hate the novel, although I do prefer the movie, probably because I saw it first and it was everything I wanted from a medieval Sherlock Holmes movie set in a monastery and devoted to forbidden books, knowledge and opinions.

You ever heard the saying, “Don’t rob the bank across from the diner that has the best donuts in three counties”?

2 Guns (2013) (SPOILERS) Denzel Washington is such a reliable performer, that it can get a bit boring. You end up knowing every gesture or inflection in advance, whether he’s playing a good guy or a bad guy. And his films are generally at least half decent, so you end up seeing them. Even in Flight (or perhaps especially in Flight ; just watch him chugging down that vodka) where he’s giving it his Oscar-nominatable best, he seems too familiar. I think it may be because he’s an actor who is more effective the less he does. In 2 Guns he’s not doing less, but sometimes it seems like it. That’s because the last person I’d ever expect blows him off the screen; Mark Wahlberg.

Piece by piece, the camel enters the couscous.

The Forgiven (2021) (SPOILERS) By this point, the differences between filmmaker John Michael McDonagh and his younger brother, filmmaker and playwright Martin McDonagh, are fairly clearly established. Both wear badges of irreverence and provocation in their writing, and a willingness to tackle – or take pot-shots – at bigger issues, ones that may find them dangling their toes in hot water. But Martin receives the lion’s share of the critical attention, while John is generally recognised as the slightly lesser light. Sure, some might mistake Seven Psychopaths for a John movie, and Calvary for a Martin one, but there’s a more flagrant sense of attention seeking in John’s work, and concomitantly less substance. The Forgiven is clearly aiming more in the expressly substantial vein of John’s earlier Calvary, but it ultimately bears the same kind of issues in delivery.

Say hello to the Scream Extractor.

Monsters, Inc. (2001) (SPOILERS) I was never the greatest fan of Monsters, Inc. , even before charges began to be levelled regarding its “true” subtext. I didn’t much care for the characters, and I particularly didn’t like the way Pixar’s directors injected their own parenting/ childhood nostalgia into their plots. Something that just seems to go on with their fare ad infinitum. Which means the Pixars I preferred tended to be the Brad Bird ones. You know, the alleged objectivist. Now, though, we learn Pixar has always been about the adrenochrome, so there’s no going back…

Haven’t you ever heard of the healing power of laughter?

Batman (1989) (SPOILERS) There’s Jaws , there’s Star Wars , and then there’s Batman in terms of defining the modern blockbuster. Jaws ’ success was so profound, it changed the way movies were made and marketed. Batman’s marketing was so profound, it changed the way tentpoles would be perceived: as cash cows. Disney tried to reproduce the effect the following year with Dick Tracy , to markedly less enthusiastic response. None of this places Batman in the company of Jaws as a classic movie sold well, far from it. It just so happened to hit the spot. As Tim Burton put it, it was “ more of a cultural phenomenon than a great movie ”. It’s difficult to disagree with his verdict that the finished product (for that is what it is) is “ mainly boring ”. Now, of course, the Burton bat has been usurped by the Nolan incarnation (and soon the Snyder). They have some things in common. Both take the character seriously and favour a sombre tone, which was much more of shock to the

In a few moments, you will have an experience that will seem completely real. It will be the result of your subconscious fears transformed into your conscious awareness.

Brainstorm (1983) (SPOILERS) Might Brainstorm have been the next big thing – a ground-breaking, game-changing cinematic spectacle that had as far reaching consequences as Star Wars (special effects) or Avatar (3D) – if only Douglas Trumbull had been allowed to persevere with his patented “Showscan” process (70mm film photographed and projected at 60 frames per second)? I suspect not; one only has to look at the not-so-far-removed experiment of Ang Lee with Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk , and how that went down like a bag of cold sick, to doubt that any innovation will necessarily catch on (although Trumbull at least had a narrative hinge on which to turn his “more real than real” imagery, whereas Lee’s pretty much boiled down to “because it was there”). Brainstorm ’s story is, though, like its title, possibly too cerebral, too much concerned with the consciousness and touting too little of the cloyingly affirmative that Bruce Rubin inevitably brings to his screenplays. T

No one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.

The Matrix (1999) (SPOILERS) Twenty years on, and the articles are on the defining nature of The Matrix are piling up, most of them touching on how its world has become a reality, or maybe always was one. At the time, its premise was engaging enough, but it was the sum total of the package that cast a spell – the bullet time, the fashions, the soundtrack, the comic book-as-live-action framing and styling – not to mention it being probably the first movie to embrace and reflect the burgeoning Internet ( Hackers doesn’t really count), and subsequently to really ride the crest of the DVD boom wave. And now? Now it’s still really, really good.

Twenty dwarves took turns doing handstands on the carpet.

Bugsy (1991) (SPOILERS) Bugsy is very much a Warren Beatty vanity project (aren’t they all, even the ones that don’t seem that way on the surface?), to the extent of his playing a title character a decade and a half younger than him. As such, it makes sense that producer Warren’s choice of director wouldn’t be inclined to overshadow star Warren, but the effect is to end up with a movie that, for all its considerable merits (including a script from James Toback chock full of incident), never really feels quite focussed, that it’s destined to lead anywhere, even if we know where it’s going.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog