The Grouchy Editor

My eyelids were drooping, and my chin was resting on my chest, when suddenly someone barked, “You talentless little shit!”

I jerked fully awake, and swiveled round to see if anyone else was in the room.  No, I was quite alone.  The shout had come from the TV screen, where actor Christian McKay was chastising his young co-star,  Zac Efron, on a city sidewalk.   “I hope you enjoyed your Broadway career, junior, because it’s over,” McKay admonished Efron. I blinked.  Was this some out-take from a “behind the scenes” confrontation during the film’s production?  Could it be that McKay shared my disdain for Efron’s performance in the movie, and somehow the DVD people had allowed this candid moment into its “extras”?

Wrong again.  The film, Me and Orson Welles, was still in progress.  I was seeing Orson Welles, McKay’s character in the movie, berating an aspiring actor played by Efron.  It was clearly an example of art imitating life.

It’s probably not fair to peg any one performance for the success or failure of a film, but in this case it’s tempting.  Me and Orson Welles dramatizes the days leading up to Welles’s triumphant Broadway staging of Julius Caesar in 1937.  But the movie makes the fatal error of focusing on the bland and humorless Efron, rather than McKay, who absolutely nails the bombastic genius Welles.  Had the film been more like a superior movie with a similar plot – My Favorite Year, starring Peter O’Toole – it could have worked.

“Jesus that’s all we need, a dozen critics with wet asses,” Welles harrumphs at another point in the film.  But the trouble with this movie is not critics with wet posteriors; it’s a young star who is still wet behind the ears.        Grade:  C+

Director:  Richard Linklater  Cast:  Zac Efron, Claire Danes, Christian McKay, Ben Chaplin, Zoe Kazan, Eddie Marsan, Kelly Reilly, James Tupper, Leo Bill, Imogen Poots  Release:  2009

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Movies like Centurion want desperately to be taken seriously, but they make it so damned difficult.  They often begin with some type of solemn, written prelude, in this case regarding an ancient dispute between the Romans and some people called the Picts (“based on a 2,000-year-old legend,” the end credits assure us).  The movie features lots of gory beheadings and spearings, swelling violin music, and some spectacular, fairytale-like photography (shot on location in Scotland), all of it skewed to make us root for hero Michael Fassbender and his fellow Romans.  But I stubbornly refused to do so.

I preferred the scruffy Picts.  For one thing, as you watch the movie, you discover that all of the supermodels were Picts.  Also, the Picts, bless their blue-painted cheeks, were the native inhabitants of Northern Britain; it was the arrogant Romans who imperialistically invaded the Picts’ homeland.  (I’m no European historian, I’ll admit; I’m just going by the story as presented.)

The main Pict supermodel, a brunette “tracker” named Etain (Olga Kurylenko), was raped and then de-tongued by nasty Romans when she was a child.  The young son of the Pict king is slaughtered by a conniving Roman.  The Roman soldiers, with whom we are meant to side, are disorganized, constantly on the run, and say “fuck” a lot.  They also speak in an odd mixture of ancient Roman and modern MTV.  “Being a legend will get you laid,” chortles one soldier, a sentiment quickly followed by, “The gods have forsaken us.” 

Which side would you root for in this dispute – the rude, vulgar, invading Romans, or the Picts with all of their supermodels, including Etain, her blonde comrade, and a fetching witch?  Oh, and these supermodels can fight:  It takes a slinky, sultry beauty like Etain to lick a Roman general in hand-to-hand combat.

All of this twaddle is filmed with deadly earnestness, but how anyone older than 12 can take any of it seriously is perplexing.  Perhaps the joke is on me.  Maybe Centurion is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, a campy frolic, but I don’t think so.  I’d ask the foxy Etain, but she has no tongue.       Grade:  C

Director:  Neil Marshall  Cast:  Michael Fassbender, Dominic West, Olga Kurylenko, Ulrich Thomsen, Imogen Poots  Release:  2010

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I went to the lake this afternoon – my childhood lake, Kandiyohi, in central Minnesota.  I shot off firecrackers on the shore, and then boated through some wavy cattails.

This was all in my imagination, of course.  I was actually in an air-conditioned movie theater, where they were showing Piranha in 3-D.  The movie takes place at “Lake Victoria” in Arizona, and that got me reminiscing about Kandiyohi.  After about 15 minutes of the movie, I couldn’t digest any more of the clunky, idiotic dialogue I was hearing, so I stopped listening and began to hear those firecrackers in my mind …. Ten minutes later, when I could no longer stomach the sight of third-rate actors and first-rate actors slumming, I stopped looking at the film.  Instead, I began to see those cattails.

Periodically, I would stop daydreaming because something would catch my eye on the screen.  One time, I was intrigued by the performance of an actress billed as “Girl Cut in Half,” who briefly displayed two enormous talents before, well, being cut in half.

A few other times, porn actress Riley Steele interrupted my reverie, once when she performed some kind of nude underwater ballet with Playboy model Kelly Brook, then again when she had to climb back onto the boat.

But mostly, I stayed on Kandiyohi Lake.  Piranha’s plot, which you’ve seen a thousand times before, and its cast – unfathomably including the likes of Richard Dreyfuss, Elisabeth Shue, and Christopher Lloyd – and its 3-D effects, which ranged from mildly amusing to downright distracting, simply could not compete with those dreamy cattails and firecrackers in my head.       Grade:  C-

Director:  Alexandre Aja  Cast:  Elisabeth Shue, Richard Dreyfuss, Ving Rhames, Christopher Lloyd, Jerry O’Connell, Kelly Brook, Riley Steele, Nancy Walters  Release:  2010

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Imagine a famous feminist – say, Gloria Steinem – sitting down with two filmmakers to do a serious interview about her life’s work.  But there’s a catch:  Her interrogators are Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell.

How you react to that scenario will likely color your view of Let It Rain, a French comedy from writer-director Agnes Jaoui.   Is this movie a satire, in which an uppity woman receives her well-deserved comeuppance?  Well … yes.  Is it social commentary that underscores the kind of obstacles, ignorance, and frustration a serious person must leap-frog to effect meaningful change?  Yup, that too.

In Let It Rain, Jaoui, who also stars as best-selling author and feminist Agathe Villanova, straddles the fence between heavy and light, but she never falls off because her main concern is people, not ideology.  The relatives and locals Agathe copes with on a visit to her hometown are largely indifferent or hostile to her cause, certainly.  But isn’t Agathe also a bit full of herself? 

Jaoui the director subjects Agathe to one slapstick situation after another, usually at the hands of those two inept filmmakers.  Everyone else Agathe encounters appears to be down-to-earth and friendly, you bet.  But don’t they all owe something to people like Agathe, people who don’t just complain but actually accomplish things? Isn’t Agathe really an island of common sense among fools and dreamers?  Or is she just a pompous ass?

There is a scene near the end of the film in which Agathe has a heart-to-heart with Mimouna, a saintly, long-suffering family servant who thinks only of others, despite major problems of her own.  “Think of yourself.  Just a little,” counsels Agathe.  Does Mimouna’s rejection of this advice make her an exemplary human being, or just a sap?  Will I ever stop asking questions in this review?

There’s a lot of chat in Let It Rain, and its ending is a bit pat, but the dialogue is never less than amusing, the characters are all engaging, and the acting is first-rate. The movie injects feminism with something its critics say it sorely lacks:  a sense of humor.  Jaoui wants you think – but only between the laughs.           Grade:  B+ 

Director:  Agnes Jaoui  Cast:  Agnes Jaoui, Jean-Pierre Bacri, Jamel Debbouze, Pascale Arbillot, Guillaume de Tonquedec, Frederic Pierrot, Mimouna Hadji  Release:  2010 

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It’s a crazy world for 15-year-old Johnny Mad Dog and his teenaged pals.  In Johnny’s world, he doesn’t worry about asking girls out — he simply kidnaps or rapes them.  When Johnny and the boys meet someone they don’t like, there are no fisticuffs; they have an Uzi to take care of the problem.  And if an older couple tries to reason with them, well, the boys can just force them to strip and then demand:  “You’ll fuck your wife, right now, in the living room … fuck for me now!”  It’s a boy’s life, indeed.

Johnny Mad Dog, with its band of vicious young males, will put some viewers in mind of A Clockwork Orange, but director Jean-Stephane Sauvaire’s documentary-style film is even more horrific because it’s not set in the future; it is fact-based and happening right now.  (Depending on which source you consult, events are based either on Liberia or the Congo Republic.)  This hypnotic horror-show demonstrates what happens when children are recruited to fight adult wars.

We follow Johnny (Christopher Minie) and his militia as they make their way toward the capital of their country, terrorizing anyone who crosses their path.  It’s a mesmerizing march, and these kids resemble a road show from hell.  One guy wears a white wedding dress; another sports gauzy, white angel wings.  These boys don’t worry about anyone dissing their fashion choices.

Between bouts of carnage, Sauvaire reminds us that these thugs are, despite everything, still boys.  A kid nicknamed No Good Advice, whose behavior has been monstrous, is reduced to tears when his pet pig is slaughtered for a meal.  Johnny, whose idea of socializing with the opposite sex is rape, is devastated when a girl he likes is murdered.  We learn that Johnny and the boys aren’t just monsters, but victims themselves.

It’s ironic that this week’s Hollywood box-office champ is The Expendables, Sly Stallone’s latest comic-book version of violence on film.  At one point in Mad Dog, Johnny picks up an Uzi and explains its function to his comrades:  “Chuck Norris used it in Delta Force,” he says.  “So be careful!  The Israelis or Chuck Norris might be around.”  Norris and Stallone movies are filled with senseless violence.  So is Johnny Mad Dog, but that’s where any similarities end.     Grade:  A-

Director:  Jean-Stephane Sauvaire  Cast:  Christopher Minie, Careen Moore, Dagbeh Tweh, Daisy Victoria Vandy, Joseph Duo  Release:  2009

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