Much Ado About Nothing

The best and last moment of Joss Whedon's Shakespeare adaptation.

I have no doubt that everyone involved in making Much Ado About Nothing thoroughly enjoyed themselves.  The story behind its production belies this.  Directed by Joss Whedon, the mind behind beloved cult television series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly as well as box office behemoth The Avengers, shot it over the course of twelve days on and around his San Diego estate with actors who have become his friends using whatever money they could find underneath their couch cushions.  The performers mug broadly for the camera, Whedon slips in his own self-written songs, and the film is shot with the cozy intimacy of a home video.  Perhaps that’s what it should have stayed.

Like any Shakespeare adaptation, this film version of one of the Bard’s more well-known comedies lives and dies by its performances.  With a few exceptions, the performances here do not do it proud.  Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof, both members of Whedon’s regular television ensembles, play Beatrice and Benedick, the verbal sparring partners at the center of the story.  They get their lines right, all of which are lifted directly from the play’s original text without alternations for modern audiences, but do little to convince us of the motivation behind them.  I have never seen a stage adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, but I assume that with the proper buildup Beatrice and Benedick’s shift from embittered adversaries to fawning lovers can be convincing.  Here it is not.

More successful are Fran Kranz and Jillian Morgese as Claudio and Hero, the film’s other will-they-or-won’t-they tent-pole couple.  Claudio and Hero fall in love at first sight, are driven apart by trickery on the part the sinister Don John (Sean Maher), and are reunited by movie’s end.  Their journey works, likely because Fran Kranz shows an earnest believability that makes one feel for him when, say, he is tricked into believing that Hero has been unfaithful.  Acker and Denifsof rattle off their lines and are satisfied that they have just said something very clever- with Shakespeare as your writer, perhaps they figured that reading the words would be enough- Kranz seems to actually believe what he’s saying, and that makes all the difference.

The blame for the movie’s unevenness belongs to Whedon.  He cast people unfit for their parts because they were his friends and did not take the time to pull convincing performances from them because the whole project was just a fun lark anyway.  Such a lark, indeed, that doing something so aggrandized as leveling blame seems pretty fruitless.  And yet here the movie is, showing in theaters across the country to be paid for and picked apart and digested.  I have a lot of respect for Whedon as a writer and director and have no right to begrudge him his hobbies, but Much Ado About Nothing proves that thoroughly enjoying yourselves while making a movie is not enough to make a movie thoroughly enjoyable.

Grade

C

This Is The End

The term ‘self-indulgent’ often gets tossed around as a pejorative.  Self-indulgent people are to be avoided, self-indulgent books left unread, and self-indulgent movies skipped.  Why spend time with anything more pleased with how clever it is than with entertaining you?

This Is The End, a very, very high-concept comedy directed and written by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogan, who also stars, is about as self-indulgent as it gets.  Rogan plays himself, Seth Rogan the actor, who lives in Los Angeles alongside his high-powered showbiz buddies.  When old friend Jay Baruchel visits, Rogan drags him to a lavish party at James Franco’s house where they run into a who’s who of famous comics, movie stars, and Rihanna, all of whom play exaggerated versions of the characters they've come to be identified with onscreen.  Seth Rogan- that’s the writer and director, not the character in the movie- has expended several million dollars to finance what is essentially an elaborate, special effects-filled parody of his life.  As far as self-indulgence goes, it’s pretty impressive.

And yet it’s hard to complain when the laughs come as reliably as they do here.  The party scene, in particular, is full of inspired comic grace notes, from digs at James Franco’s pretentious art collection to Michael Cera playing himself as a coke-hungry lecher.  For those in on the joke, it’s funny stuff.

Those not in on the joke will be entertained as well, especially after the earth around James Franco’s house opens up to swallow most of the guests whole and the land beyond his walls turns into a scorched Hellscape complete with winged demons and roving bands of cannibals.  That’s the movie’s high concept: how will a bunch of comedy actors- along with Rogan, Baruchel, and Franco, Jonah Hill and Craig Robinson also survive the initial catastrophe- deal with the coming of the Biblical apocalypse?

If you’ve seen many of the other comedies produced by Judd Apatow and his followers, you can probably guess.  They bicker, they have foul-mouthed, off the cuff conversations, and they get high while making cheap sequels to their previous hits using the camera from 127 Hours (James Franco keeps his props).  The apocalyptic material also allows for a lot of physical gags and parody- Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist each get a good workout- and the jokes come at a very fast clip.  It’s cozy, goofy, and easy to watch, and the best moments come when the actors are allowed to riff on each other for effortless comic payoffs.  The cast displays the kind of boyish, cheerfully vulgar camaraderie we’re used to from Apatow and his ilk- he’s always made movies about endearing man-children- but setting those antics against the end of the world sheds some light on how immature these characters really are.

The movie takes this idea and almost runs with it, but eventually gets back to looking like an excuse for Rogan and pals to goof off on movie screens across the country and to charge you for it.  I should be mad at them for this.  If self-indulgence means wallowing in what interests you to the exclusion of what might interest others, than This Is The End might be the most self-indulgent movie ever shot.  There are certainly moments that go too far- the ending, for example, seems too much like a reference in search of a joke.  But I can’t be mad.  The movie is made with too much good cheer, too much loopy enthusiasm.  Perhaps Rogan and company really aren’t interested in writing about anything beyond who they are and what they like, but by this point they’ve learned to do it in a way that’s infectiously entertaining enough to get past my barriers.  This Is The End is too insular to set the world on fire, but will appeal to those who can take a good inside joke.

HBO Exucutive Named As America's Ambassador to Spain

Yesterday, the Obama administration appointed James Costos, HBO's vice president of global licensing and retail, as the United States ambassador to Spain, making good use of his intimate knowledge concerning vampire-human relations and the migration patterns of Dothraki hordes.

The appointment probably has more to do with Costos' fundraising efforts on behalf of the Democratic Party, but those skills can't hurt.  Former movie studio executive Rufus Gifford and soap opera producer Colleen Bell are also up for nominations, so if anyone would like to make wild speculations about the power of the government-entertainment complex, now would be the time.

Television Actresses Fail to Raise $32,000 for Their Percussive Folk Band

Zosia Mamet is one of the stars of HBO's Girls.  Clara Mamet is a regular on the ABC sitcom The Neighbors.  Their father is David Mamet, a man with a Pulitzer Prize and writing credits like Glengarry Glen Ross  and The Untouchables to his name.  His daughters tried to use Kickstarter to raise $32,000 to make a music video for their experimental folk song 'Bleak Love'.  Today they failed.

The instinct in cases like this is to rant and rail against the wealthy elites who are so detached they believe it's okay to ask people to support their personal hobby in an amount about equal to what many of those people pull down in a year, but we have to remember that such individuals grew up in a unique cultural context and have feelings and dreams and tastefully apportioned New York City brownstones and enough money to wallpaper their rooms with and that they can probably take it so rant and rail away.

Star Trek Into Darkness

The first thing you should know about Star Trek Into Darkness is that it is not a science fiction movie.  I mean, yes, there are spaceships and aliens and cryogenically frozen super-humans, but science fiction, real science fiction, is supposed to engage with such far-flung concepts as a way to ask and answer questions about who we are and where we’re going as a species, while Star Trek Into Darkness uses them to point the way to the next exquisitely photographed action scene.

The second thing you should know about Star Trek Into Darkness is that this is okay.  It is not a high-minded movie, but director J.J. Abrams has reassembled the likable cast from his 2009 Star Trek and thrown them into a story so fast-paced you won’t even have time to think about thinking.  In fact, the pace is so rapid that it can be disorienting, especially toward the beginning when the narrative completely reorients itself every ten or so minutes.  A playful opening that finds the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise observing an alien civilization makes it look like the movie will be about what happens when a primitive people are exposed to advanced technology.  Then it looks like it will about how Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) will deal with being relieved of his command, and finally it settles into following the manhunt for an intergalactic terrorist (Benedict Cumberbatch), with a few more twists along the way.

We’re willing to follow the knotty plot because the cast is appealing and the action sequences are entertaining.  Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, as Spock, still have a charming odd-couple rapport, although their relationship isn’t as important here as it was in the previous picture.  The scene-stealer this time around is Benedict Cumberbatch as the villainous Khan.  Like everything else in the movie, this character is introduced, developed, and denounced at an accelerated rate and could have fell flat were in not for Cumberbatch’s intensity.  He has a way of over-pronouncing his words while glaring into the camera that makes you sure he is a dangerous man.

And he is.  He leaves the Star Trek crew battled and battered but not broken or beaten, and that’s one of the movie’s problems.  This is the second of what the good folks at Paramount Pictures doubtlessly hope will be a long-running movie series, but by the end it doesn’t feel like much has changed.  The same group will be back on the same ship in a few year’s time, and unless the producers feel like putting something more at risk, return trips could quickly become tiresome.

On its own, this movie feels polished but perfunctory, with plenty of scenes that work while you watch them but without a bigger vision that will make you remember them the next morning.  You can almost see the screenwriters storyboarding the film as you watch it- something for the action junkies here, a few references to the original television series there- but there’s no through-line, no unifying idea of the kind that enervated the older Star Trek movies.  Again, that’s all okay, but that’s all it is.

The Great Gatsby

 
I have not read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in many years.  I remember it only vaguely- I know the outline of the story, recall a heavy use of symbolism, and for some reason can recite the final line, the bit about the boats and the current the past, word for word- but for the most part I treat it as one of those books I know is considered great, but about which I don’t remember enough to explain why.

I remember Moulin Rogue!, though, the 2001 jukebox musical featuring late 19th Century Parisians singing their hearts out to modern pop songs which went on to delight and bewilder audiences around the world.  Baz Luhrmann, the director of that film, brings a lot of the same high-riding anachronistica to The Great Gatsby, but in this case the material resists him.  He ends up with a movie split down the middle that will be interesting to many but satisfying to few.

Like Moulin Rogue!, this film version of The Great Gatsby begins with a writer remembering the heady days of his not-so-distant past.  He is Nick Carroway (Toby McGuire), and not so long ago he was young, idealistic, and attending sinfully lavish parties thrown by his rich next-door neighbor, Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio).  The first half of the movie is dominated by a mighty shindig thrown in and around Gatsby’s sprawling bayside estate.  It’s bombastic and fantastic, a fourteen-cuts-a-second orgiastic liquor volcano kind of party where every guest is done up like a neon peacock and where important characters are introduced with flourishes of Gershwin music.  It’s also one of the duller parts of the movie.  The Great Gatsby is a story with a lot of nuance, and a garishly stylized depiction of jazz age opulence featuring songs from Beyonce and Jay Z does little to deal with it.  In Moulin Rogue!, the gaudiness was the point.  Here, it’s the prelude to the real story, and quickly wears out its welcome.

The real story, meanwhile, is rich but feels like it should be richer.  Gatsby, who is wealthy, wealthy, wealthy, but oh so alone, pines after upright New York debutante Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), with whom he shared a passionate love affair years before.  She lives across the bay and is unhappily married to the philandering Tom (Joel Edgerton).  Together they are even wealthier than Gatsby, and unlike Gatsby, their money is old.

After Gatsby enlists Nick’s help in a successful bid to reignite his affair with Daisy, the movie all but abandons the extravagance of the first half and settles into a new life as a chamber drama.  The strongest scene occurs in a hotel room where all the principal characters get to air their grievances.  There is no anachronistic music, no voiceover narration, no epileptic editing.  It’s almost disappointingly traditional, but it does a better job of getting to the meat of the story than any of the other thousand-and-one bells and whistles Luhrmann chose to hang all over this gussied-up showhorse of a feature film.

And yet it doesn’t do enough.  The characters, particularly Daisy, still seem underdeveloped, their motivations lacking, and the denouncement leaves us with no deeper insight into Gatsby than that he was a naïve man unlucky in love.  There are other missteps.  The liberal use of Fitzgerald’s text as voiceover narration is occasionally affecting but mostly useless, and the press of Significantly Symbolic Shots would have more heft if we understood what the characters wanted and needed.  Luhrmann wanted to make visually experimental music video about the roaring twenties, and he wanted to adapt The Great Gatsby.  He’s done a little of both, and ended up with neither.