Movie Box Review

Showtime took a major step forward this season with its gripping new drama series Homeland, a show worthy of being mentioned with anything on TV.  The network's new comedy HOUSE OF LIES, though, is considerably less of an event.

The setting may be the world of management consulting rather than show business, but based on its pilot, House of Lies is trying too hard to copy its hour-mate Californication.  Don Cheadle has the David Duchovny unprincipled-but-talented role, playing Marty Kaan; it's no accident that his last name is pronounced like "con," because Marty's consulting business is essentially a con game--he manipulates jargon and statistics to tell huge companies what they want to hear in a way they're not expecting, and rakes in their cash.  In the pilot, he finds a way to spin a Wall Street firm's desire to justify its huge bonuses despite the recession, so that they'll look socially conscious even as they're buying yachts.  Marty is cynical and more than a little soulless, but he's our hero because he also has a breezy sense of humor and great charm.  (And because he's played by Don Cheadle.)

Marty has a team (he calls it the "pod") of young colleagues:  Jeannie (Kristen Bell), who's lovely and who, inevitably, Marty wants to sleep with (for now, at least, they merely exchange flirtatious banter); Doug (Josh Lawson), who went to Harvard; and Clyde (Ben Schwartz), who didn't.  So far Marty is the only character with a back-story:  he lives with his retired shrink father (Glynn Turman) and his young son (Denis Leonard, Jr), who's experiencing gender issues (in the pilot, we know he's potentially gay because he wants to play Sandy in a school production of Grease and go shoe-shopping).  Marty's token bit of depth comes with the disclosure that his mother committed suicide, although at this point we don't know anything about the circumstances.  Meanwhile, the show features the ever-popular contrivance of Marty's ex-wife (Dawn Olivieri) also being his most ferocious competitor in the consulting trade, as well as a terrible mother, a pill-popper and Marty's sometime bed partner.

House of Lies was created by Matthew Carnahan (based on a novel by Martin Kihn), who was previously the creator of Skin, the similarly cynical show about tabloid journalism with Courtney Cox that stumbled through a couple of seasons on FX.  Carnahan's work here is glib and superficial in a way that's moderately entertaining, but so far not emotionally involving at all.  Unlike Californication, there are no bonds of believable friendship between the characters, and nothing to compare to the thread of doomed romance between Duchovny's character and Natascha McElhone's that has always given that show its center.  Carnahan's plotting in the pilot seems aimed more at finding spots for gratuitous pay cable sex (a strip club is a key location for the episode, and a key plot point requires 2 of the female characters to jump each others' bones within about 30 seconds of meeting) than anything else. which is another unwise attempt to ape Californication's free-wheeling softcore style.

The one thing House of Lies clearly has going for it is its cast.  Cheadle, of course, is one of the best character actors around, skilled at comedy and drama, and he's capable of holding audience affection no matter how much of a snake Marty is.  (One of the show's more effective gimmicks is letting Marty step out of scenes to explain the consulting business directly to viewers.)  It's a pleasure to see Kristen Bell back playing a character with sharp, witty dialogue after her disastrous attempts to become a movie star, while Ben Schwartz has been hysterical as Jean-Ralphio on Parks & Recreation, and is clearly capable of doing more than the pilot allows.   

House of Lies has plenty of potential.  It's a smooth piece of work (the pilot was directed by Stephen Hopkins), painless to watch, with likable leads and a decent premise.  What it needs, though, is something to be about other than its own dexterity.

If Arthur Schnitzler had only been a member of the WGA in 1900, when he wrote the play La Ronde, and he'd had the benefit of the format rights guild members receive today, he and his descendants would be very rich indeed.  Schnitzler's concept, a series of sequences in which, initially, Person A meets with Person B, who in the next scene encounters Person C, who then shares a scene with Person D, and so on until Person Z is with Person A, has become a archetypal structure for both literature and drama.  The newest entry to be inspired by Schnitzler's work is 360, directed by Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener) from a script by Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon). which premiered tonight at the Toronto Film Festival.

Schnitzler's play used its format to make a point about interrelationships between the classes (and, since the relationships were all implicitly sexual, a darkly comic one about the spread of venereal diseases).  In the Meirelles/Morgan version, the title 360 refers not only to the degrees of a circle, but also the circular nature of the Earth; unlike Schnitzler's tale, which took place entirely in Vienna, the film begins in that city but then travels around the world, with stops in London, Paris, Bratislava, Denver, Phoenix and other locations before returning to Vienna.  The point of all this, however, is more obscure.

The connections between the stories in 360 are somewhat more tangential than in La Ronde.  a hooker in Vienna doesn't quite meet a businessman from London (Jude Law); a recovering alcoholic searching for his long-lost daughter (Anthony Hopkins) strikes up the barest friendship on an airplane with his Brazilian seatmate (Maria Flor) who's returning home after a bad romance.  The result is that one has to hunt for an overriding theme, other than chance decisions and the coincidences cited by the narration.  Is the film saying something about globalization?  Modern morality?  If its only reason for being is to note that one fluke can lead to another, that's not a very satisfying theme.

That being said, 360 is often quite enjoyable to watch.  The soundtrack alone, which includes an extraordinarily diverse set of songs, is exceptional.  Beyond that, Meirelles has assembled a very fine cast both famous (Rachel Weisz and Ben Foster, in addition to Hopkins and Law) and relatively unknown (Flor, as well as Tereza Sbova, Vladimir Vdovichenkov and Dinara Drukarova).  There's also impeccable photography by Adriano Goldman, and a remarkably lucid job of balancing multiple stories by editor Daniel Rezende (who also worked on City of God). 

A film like 360 is almost by definition uneven, since watching it is more akin to following an anthology than a typical narrative.  Some of the episodes are genuinely moving and suspenseful, while others feel like slack connective tissue.  What should make the work succeed as a whole is the uniting purpose of the enterprise.  Here that seems to be deeply buried if not lacking, and the result is a picture that never brings its circle together.

Put it this way:  the new superhero epic THOR cost something like $150M to produce, required the diligent services of hundreds of professionals over a period of 2 years, is being presented with all the trappings of IMAX, 3D and super-stereo, and yet there's not a moment in it as exciting--let alone as much fun--as last night's paintball episode of "Community."   Now "Community"s paintball episodes are completely awesome, so that's a fairly high standard... but still. 

Thor isn't the worst superhero picture to come our way (remember the Fantastic Four movies?  the Joel Schumacher Batmans?  Superman:  The Quest for Peace?), but it may be the most underwhelming.  Marvel presumably hired Kenneth Branagh to direct because of his association with Shakespearean drama (it certainly wasn't because of his action movie chops), and under his helm the picture presents itself with extreme seriousness--the hero's backstory is interweaved with Norse mythology, which here takes place in an Asgard located in outer space, and Thor himself, not a mere immigrant from his planet a la Superman, is essentially a god.  The Asgard scenes take place in massive, fake-looking sets that look like they were re-lit from Cecil B DeMille's Egyptian palaces in The Ten Commandments, with equally phony CG landscapes that seem modeled after the matte paintings in David Lynch's version of Dune.  In case that wasn't enough, no less than Anthony Hopkins was brought in to roar his way through the role of the one-eyed King Odin, father of Thor (if I was hearing correctly, he's called "Allfather," although it's not clear if that's his convenient last name or a salute to his parenting skills).  

As written by Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz and Don Payne (from a story by J. Michael Straczynski and Mark Protosevich), the Asgard section of the tale gives Thor (Chris Hemsworth) an evil brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston)--we know Loki is evil because he's made up to look like Richard E. Grant (unlike Thor's robustly Aryan good looks) and he turns out to be adopted--who plots with the nearby ice people (kinged by Colm Feore behind a lot of digital effects) to take advantage of Thor's impulsive arrogance and depose Odin, banish Thor to Earth and take over the throne.  But not to worry, Thor still has 4 warrior buddies on Asgard--a fat one, a hot babe, an inexplicably Asian one, and one who looks oddly like the young Kenneth Branagh--to protect his interests.  Meanwhile, back in banishment (specifically New Mexico), Thor crashes to Earth right in the path of spunky, lovely young scientist Jane (Natalie Portman, this having been shot before she knew Black Swan was about to change her career), her kooky sidekick Darcy (the criminally underused Kat Dennings, from Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist) and mentor Erik (Stellan Skarsgard, Hollywood's go-to professor).  This will come as a shock, but spunky scientist Jane finds herself falling for the hunky god-in-exile, while he learns a handy lesson about appreciating humanity and accepting self-sacrifice, which is useful because--did I mention?--only when Thor shows he is worthy can he regain possession of his magic hammer Mjolnir, which apparently has been watching "Camelot" on Starz and is stuck immovable in a rock until such time as a worthy god can retrieve it.  And since this is a Marvel movie and everything has to lead to their megafranchise Avengers picture next year, Clark Gregg from Iron Man (and eventually Samuel L Jackson) are lurking around, although how Thor will connect with SHIELD is left unclear in this installment.

And you know what?  All of that, as dumb and dense as it is, would be fine if the movie were just enjoyable (try talking yourself through the storyline of Batman Begins one day).  Branagh does some things right--he gets humor from Hemsworth, Portman and Dennings in the fish-out-of-water New Mexico scenes, and Hiddleston is a fine villain once you realize he's going to act like the "trusted" family friend in 1940s movies who turns out to be a Nazi spy.  There's also one genuinely cool CG moment when a giant robot Loki's sent to Earth manages to reverse itself back-to-front without turning around.  But Branagh doesn't know how to edit the action sequences--he completely muffs the big moment when Thor regains his powers--and the script, which probably went through many more writers than those credited, dribbles off at the end, so the final confrontation between Thor and Loki has so little impact you expect the real climax to follow.  (The 3D, as increasingly expected, is virtually without impact.)  Even the coda scene (you have to sit through all 10 minutes of credits to get there, unlike Fast Five, which mercifully lets the audience go after the first couple of minutes) delivers less of a set-up for the next chapter than you'd hope.

Thor's florid tone is completely different from the more sophisticated, character-based wit of the Iron Man series (not to mention those of the two failed Hulk movies), which makes one wonder just how they're planning to bind them all together for The Avengers.  But that's next summer's problem.  The good thing about summer blockbusters is that they're like buses--if the first one that stops doesn't look like a comfortable ride, just wait and there'll be another.  The buses have just started to run for Summer 2011, so let's hope the vehicles to come have better engines.

(THOR - Paramount/Marvel - 117 minutes - PG 13 - Director:  Kenneth Branagh - Script: Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz, Don Payne (story by J. Michael Straczynski, Mark Protosevich) - Cast:  Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins, Stellan Skarsgard, Clark Gregg, Kat Dennings, Idris Elba, Colm Feore, Ray Stevenson, Tadanobu Asano, Josh Dallas, Jaimie Alexander - Wide Release)