The new romantic comedy Valentine’s Day has everything – that is, except for characters and a plot. Overstuffed with star wattage and storytelling clichés but not one single idea of substance, Gary Marshall’s film only needed to be this February’s He’s Just Not That Into You, and it couldn’t even be that. Rather, it’s an updated ‘70s disaster movie where the central event is stupidity, and all of the actors in it are helpless to resist since one imagines their paychecks are at the bottom of that black, bleak hole.

Jessica Alba and Ashton Kutcher in Valentine's Day

Seriously, though, it truly does have more marquee names than three Ocean’s films: Ashton Kutcher, Jennifer Garner, Julia Roberts, Bradley Cooper, Anne Hathaway, Queen Latifah, Jamie Foxx, Topher Grace, Jessicas Biel and Alba, Taylors Lautner and Swift, and Shirley MacLaine are only some of the people who appear in its tapestry of romantic vignettes. Unfortunately, they have nothing to do but be themselves, or occasionally, cardboard cutouts of actual people with real problems. The plot, as it were follows each of these people through their February 14^th, as they find, lose, discover and recover relationships, thankfully resolving all loose ends by the time Marshall offers a cathartic gag reel over the closing credits.

To say that screenwriter Katherine Fugate knows or cares nothing about the way people actually behave is an understatement, and if she knows people who do actually behave this way, then she needs to meet some new people. But to dismiss an event rom-com like this as pure wish-fulfillment fluff is just cinematic negligence; seven years ago Richard Curtis set the standard for mainstream ensemble relationship movies with Love Actually, to which this film owes an enormous debt, if not a Writer’s Guild story credit, and there’s just no excuse for such lazy, uninspired, and uninspiring storytelling as what’s on display here.

Anne Hathaway and Topher Grace in Valentine's Day

Additionally, the inevitable success of Valentine’s Day by doofuses who think this constitutes entertainment, much less introspection on the subject of relationships, is what will no doubt vindicate the filmmakers. And, of course, beget more epic pieces of crap where all character details are communicated through dialogue rather than action, problems occur because the laws of nature bend themselves around reality to make things mess up, and resolutions fully solve any and all problems forever and ever. But then again, maybe that’s what some people want to see, or just to happen in their lives – idiotic drama paired with improbable solutions.

For my money, I’d prefer to see actual love. But in lieu of that, I’d gladly settle for Love Actually, rather than this tangled mess of movie stars in search of something to do.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars 1 1/2 Stars out of 5

About this time of year, every year, there’s at least one spare, micro-budgeted indie film that features a ruminative, calling card performance by an aging actor. This year that film is That Evening Sun, and that actor is Hal Holbrook, Oscar-nominated a few years back for Into the Wild. Based on a short story by William Gay, and gracefully adapted for the screen by director Scott Teems, the movie might best be described as a coming-to-terms-with-age tale — part mournfully rustic, part delightfully crotchety, and entirely a fitting vehicle for Holbrook’s underappreciated talents.
The erstwhile big screen “Deep Throat” stars as Abner Meecham, an aging Tennessee farmer who absconds from the assisted living facility he’s set up in by his lawyer son (Walton Goggins), and catches a ride back to his country farm to live out his days in peace. Upon his return, though, he discovers his property has been leased to an old enemy and his family. Not one to either suffer fools or be dictated to, Abner moves into the old tenant shack on the property and declares he will not leave until the farm is returned to him. But Lonzo Choat (Raymond McKinnon), the new tenant, has no intention of giving in to Abner’s demands, and so an increasingly edgy and dangerous battle of wills ensues.
Trading in slow pans, simple set-ups, and outdoor locations that match the material, Teems doesn’t try to showcase a bunch of directorial razzle dazzle. Southern characters are frequently woefully misrepresented in American film, but, if you ignore the molasses-dipped names, That Evening Sun has an easy, unforced sense of authenticity that takes it a long way. There’s a Faulknerian specificity here, and Holbrook doesn’t overplay the emotion, expressing the grace notes of a man swallowed up by both frustration and regrets he won’t as readily admit.
Abner’s decisions are sometimes a bit more impulsive than seem genuine for a man of his age, no matter the heart behind them. But That Evening Sun reminds us that feeling is often stronger than thought, in adolescence and old age alike.

(PG-13, 2 1/2 put of Five )
Would Like This: Fans of Starting Out in the Evening, An Unfinished Life, Secondhand Lions

(PG-13, 4 out of 5)
Would Like This: Fans of Richard Linklater, Cradle Will Rock,
Topsy-Turvy, High School Musical

-Brent Simon

(R, 4 out of 5 )
Would Like This: Fans of Adventureland, Juno, the French New Wave

- Brent Simon

(R, 5 out of 5 )
Would Like This: Fans of Sideways, Election

-Brent Simon

Would Like This: Fans of Road to Perdition, The Postman,
Requiem for a Dream

(R, 3 out of 5)

-Brent Simon

Set in Los Angeles in 1962, A Single Man, centers on George Falconer (Colin Firth), a 52-year-old British college professor struggling to find meaning after the sudden death of his boyfriend Jim (Matthew Goode). George is consoled, if rather brusquely, by his closest friend, Charley (Julianne Moore), a 48-year-old Tanqueray depository wrestling with her own questions about the future. As George ponders suicide, a young student coming to terms with his own true nature, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), feels in George a kindred spirit, and makes it a point to reach out to him.

On a certain level, A Single Man seems to posit that isolation and loneliness is an inescapable and inherent part of the human condition, which makes the performance of Hoult (About a Boy), who communicates in batted eyelashes and seems a little too cutesy-pinup to pull off the necessary emotional maturity required in his increasing flirtations with his teacher, additionally problematic. Kenny comes across as an idealized angel ripped from the pages of some Calvin Klein ad, and not someone that George would be interested in, particularly given what we see of his relationship with Jim.

There’s also a bit of fussiness in some of the art direction, and by the time the third symbolic underwater sequence comes along, it feels a bit much. Still, Firth is absolutely excellent, and deserving of a Best Actor Oscar nomination, which should be a mortal lock. In almost single-handed fashion, he makes A Single Manworth seeing.

(R, 4  out of 5 )

Would Like This: Fans of Brokeback Mountain, Far From Heaven, An Education

-Brent Simon

A simple, straightforward and sweetly dispositioned multi-generational dramedy without much thunderclap revelation, Michael Caine’s Is Anybody There? marks the sort of solid, unfussy, character-rooted filmmaking that Hollywood studios have mostly abandoned in their pursuit of the latest hot-shit comic book or videogame property.
Set in 1980’s seaside England, the movie tells the story of gangly 10-year-old Edward (Son of Rambow’s Bill Milner), whose parents have turned their small house into a retirement home. While his mother (Anne-Marie Duff) struggles to keep the family business afloat and his father (David Morrissey) copes with the onset of a mid-life crisis exacerbated by the proximity of a young assistant, Edward becomes increasingly obsessed with the ghosts and potential afterlives of the residents when they die.
Naturally, this hobby doesn’t exactly make him popular with the other kids at school. In fact, Edward’s existence is a relatively lonely one until he meets Clarence (Caine), the latest arrival at his parents’ home. A cranky, retired magician and bitterly grieving widower who refuses to give in gracefully to old age, Clarence butts heads with Edward, but soon notices that the boy is growing up even more fitfully than he’s growing old. As they begin to face life together, Clarence takes steps toward coming to terms with his past, while Edward curbs his obsession with the unknown. Along the way, both are reminded of what magic is possible when life
is lived to its fullest.
Written by Peter Harness and directed by John Crowley (Boy A), Is Anybody There? seems made for a comfortable, rainy day double feature with 2003’s Secondhand Lions, another film in which Caine plays a somewhat irascible mentor to a precocious youngster. His performance isn’t ferocious or wildly theatrical, but instead just rather perfectly modulated. Unselfconsciously naturalistic, Milner exhibited a tremendous sympathy in Son of Rambow, and he doesn’t disappoint
here, either. He serves as a believable foil to Caine, and the two have a pleasant chemistry, whether sparring or circling one another in a quietly appreciative fashion.
As the movie advances, its one story-related reveal – the card up its sleeve, as it were – might become evident to those searching for a narrative pivot. In the end, that doesn’t matter because of the smart way the film is put together, the full-bodied emotions granted each character, and a wild, bloody, darkly humorous magic trick gone wrong that wouldn’t have ever made the cut in a conventional Hollywood dramedy. Maybe it’s best to leave these sorts of micro-targeted tales to the indie peddlers after all. (Big Beach, PG-13, 94 minutes)

2005’s Unleashed starred Bob Hoskins as a particularly nasty gangster and Jet Li, who’s been literally raised as a caged dog, as his feral, martial arts-gifted enforcer. At the time it seemed a silly conceit for an action film, something just outrageous enough to serve as a juicy hook while also providing a modicum of emotional mooring so that Li could crack skulls in sympathetic fashion as he moved toward becoming a self-actualized adult.
Strangely, it was Unleashed that first came to mind while watching James Toback’s Tyson, a gripping documentary about the former undisputed heavyweight champion who flamed out in a haze of drugs, car crashes, and outside-the-ring violence and criminal behavior. After all, despite standing under six feet and never topping 219 pounds during his professional career, Mike Tyson comes across here as less human and more the original “manimal,” a fierce, brutal and unrelentingly single-minded boxing machine who took no mercy on opponents because none was ever taken on him in adolescence.
Tyson grabs viewers from the first frame. An exercise in subjectivity (Tyson is the only present-day interviewee, though others are glimpsed in archival footage), the film cuts a cursory swath through his heartbreaking childhood in poverty-stricken Brooklyn, and quickly hones in on Tyson’s relationship with Cus D’Amato. A trainer who helped rescue Tyson from juvenile detention, D’Amato became his legal guardian in 1984, taking the teenager into his own home and giving focus to his rage before dying of pneumonia at 77 years of age. With the same management team put in place by D’Amato overseeing his life, both personally and professionally, Tyson would be able to stay focused for four or five more years before spiraling wildly out of control. A turbulent one-year marriage to actress Robin Givens – which spawned headlines about car crashes, money squabbles, drunken screaming matches and worse – yielded a divorce, followed by depression, drug abuse, professional humiliation, and all manner of wildly antisocial behavior.
It would be easy to open the movie with footage of Tyson’s stunning loss to Buster Douglas – perhaps the biggest upset ever in an individual sport – but Toback instead showcases the 20-year-old Tyson’s first title fight, a destruction of Trevor Berbick. This savvy reset is a smart approach, as it whets one’s appetite, no matter how much they may or may not know about Tyson or his fight career, for an exploration of exactly how the failure of this unstoppable athletic specimen
came to unfold.
Using a slightly overlapping dialogue technique, as well as occasionally shifting split screens, Toback infuses the movie with a sense of restlessness and kinetic energy, which is certainly in keeping with its subject’s digressive mindset. The portrait that slowly emerges, in Polaroid-esque fashion, is a heartbreakingly conflicting one, of both wounded child and raging beast. Tyson is like the tangled mess of cords behind your television entertainment center; all raw nerve endings and intense surface feelings, he’s an emotional, unchecked id without any of the adult tools – in terms of either formal education or mooring life experiences – to substantively cope with his problems.
As a film, Tyson’s only uncomfortable failing, really, has to do with the lens of subjectivity – otherwise a strong point – that it refuses to modify when it comes to the boxer’s rape conviction and other charges of domestic abuse. While Tyson does address each of these incidents, he has previously proven himself to be an unreliable or vague narrator (sometimes charmingly so), and the short shrift given these serious incidents feels a bit unseemly. The omission of certain biographical facts (Tyson’s father, whom he never knew, is said to have fathered 16 kids), or a bit more about the therapy, if any, that has calmed Tyson would have also helped round and deeper shade the movie, but as is it remains a fascinating portrait of an unlikely but oddly compelling modern-day Shakespearean figure. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 90 minutes)