Movie Box Review

Romantic comedies that are actually romantic and comic are so rare these days, it doesn't matter so much that WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER? is in many ways thoroughly second-rate.  It delivers some laughs and a likable couple to root for, and as you're watching it, the part of your mind objectively noting all the flaws and sloppiness is gradually eclipsed by the part that shrugs and says "Awww."

It would be impossible, for example, to defend the very premise of the movie, which stems from a novel by Karyn Bosnak, adapted by Gabrielle Allan and Jennifer Crittenden.  Anna Faris plays Ally Darling ("Darling"?  Really, was that necessary?), a young woman whose younger sister Daisy Darling (Ari Graynor) is getting married, and in the way of women in romantic comedies, this makes Ally borderline insane about the need to be settled down.  She's particularly distressed when she realizes that her count of lovers has reached just about 20, and some study in Marie-Claire says that any woman who's slept with that many men will never find a husband.  So, obsessed with not exceeding her allotment, Ally decides to track down her 20 men in the hope that one of them will have morphed into her Prince Charming.  

So far, so hypocritically pretending to be sexually liberated while actually being completely morally retro.  But wait:  across the hall from Ally lives a dissolute, womanizing, good-looking and frequently unclothed aspiring musician named Colin (Chris Evans), who agrees to help Ally find her exes in exchange for getting refuge in her apartment from his own one-night stands.  Do you really need me to say who turns out to be the perfect man for Ally?  Who cleans up his own act and and is the only one who appreciates Ally for the woman she really is?  And that just as this is becoming clear, Ally will find herself pursued by a man who is, in every superficial way, Perfect, meaning that she'll have to make A Choice?

I mean, ugh.  Absolutely.  And yet... The script has some snap and off-hand surprises, and more importantly, it has Faris and Evans.  Faris has been waiting to be the Next Big Thing for so long that it feels like a broken record, and it looked like The House Bunny was going to be her ticket--but even though that movie was a hit, she's still not A Name.  She's even better in Number than she was in Bunny, because she gets to be smart instead of Judy Hollidayish dumb-yet-wise.  And Evans, who seems to be trying to prove himself in every genre at once this year, from the action heroics of Captain America to the serious drama of Puncture, does a softer version of the sleazy-guy-who-turns-sensitive that Gerard Butler's been playing in movies like The Ugly Truth and The Bounty Hunter, and it works.  He and Faris have a real comic rapport that's sexy and comfortable, and it makes them a pleasure to watch together.

The movie also has an unusually strong supporting cast, with people like Blythe Danner as Ally's disapproving mother, Eliza Coupe and Heather Burns as two of her friends, Andy Samberg, Chris Pratt, Anthony Mackie, Joel McHale and Martin Freeman as some of the exes, and Dave Annable as Mr. Perfect. Mark Mylod, who's been a house director on Entourage, keeps things moving briskly toward the predetermined ending and lets Faris and Evans do their stuff. 

It's more than a little uncool to admit enjoying What's Your Number? because every step of the way, it would be perfectly fair to characterize the movie as cliched, predictable and as subtle as a CG robot battle.  But a little wit and charm go a long way in this genre, and while Number isn't--well, it certainly isn't Crazy Stupid Love--it's an enjoyable piece of undemanding fluff.

No one is going to see PUNCTURE in theaters, and that's a shame, because unaccountably, it's one of the best pictures around.  "Unaccountably," because this is a film that doesn't even seem to know there's a radar to fly below:  although it contains an award-caliber performance by Chris Evans--yes, Captain America Chris Evans; No, I don't get it either--it made little stir when it screened at the Tribeca Film Festival last spring, it's playing in 2 theaters in NY and 1 in LA (the latter was half-full for a weekend show), and according to Amazon, a January date has already been set for the DVD release.  So like the story it tells, the film itself is something of a lost cause, but one that deserves to be championed.

At first, Puncture seems like it's going to be the FX version of TNT's goofy TV show Franklin & Bash  That's the one about a pair of wacky young lawyers who are brilliant in the courtroom but who party hard and constantly after hours.  (It being TNT, "hard-partying" means a great deal of beer and some bong jokes.)  Mike Weiss (Evans) is a lot farther gone, with tastes that include coke, crack, pills and a copious number of hookers.  Mike has driven off his wife, his colleagues, and really almost everyone else except his best friend and partner Paul Danziger (Mark Kassen, who also directed with his brother Adam); he's a genuinely, if sometimes barely, functioning drug addict.

Puncture is one of the rare "based on a true story" movies that actually feels as if it is one, and that's probably due in part to the fact that Danziger himself gets co-story credit on the script with Ela Thier, and that he's clearly a believer in the "warts and all" school of storytelling; the screenplay itself is by Chris Lopata.  (This is the first feature for both directors and all of the writers.)  When the partners, in the late 1990s, take on the case of a nurse (Vinessa Shaw) stricken with AIDS due to a dangerous type of hypodermic needles used in hospitals, and then the inventor (Marshall Bell) whose far safer needle is being kept from sale by the medical supply conglomerates, their interests are more ambitious than charitable.  And even when they commit to the case, they falter as much as they succeed, often at the mercy of the conglomerate's lawyer Nathaniel Price (Brett Cullen, in a marvelously smooth villainous turn).

The film is, to a large extent, about human frailty and corruption, and it doesn't spare anyone, going far darker than you'd ever imagine it would (this isn't Erin Brockovich).  Even the characters whose hearts are in the right place fail their friends and colleagues, and the story has the challenging ring of real life.  Evans is stunningly convincing as someone whose brain simply will not turn off (he practices his closing statements on the hookers, pimps and druggies who hang out with him), a man on the precipice between the possibility of rescuing himself and falling apart.  To its credit, and indicative of Puncture's startling tone, the movie never has the scene where anyone tells Mike moralistically how he's ruining his life, or where he almost runs over a child or commits some other heinous act while under the influence so he can understand that he has to change his life; when he tries to reform himself, it's for the most pragmatic reasons.  

With the exception of Bell's stubborn client, in his own way as self-destructive as Mike, the other characters are thinner--Danziger is little more than the responsible partner with a pregnant wife, Price's corporate evildoer is straight out of every John Grisham novel--but all are extremely well played.  Even in small parts, Shaw as the pitiable nurse and Kate Burton as a blunt Senator whose influence the lawyers court are worth noting.  Despite what must have been a very low budget, there is crisp photography by Helge Gerull, hurtling editing by Chip Smith, and a distinctive score by Ryan Ross Smith, all of them also doing their first notable feature work.  

Puncture isn't fully satisfying.  There's a plot device late in the story that's played far more sentimentally than anything in the rest of the movie, and although what happens in the final scene makes sense, it's something that also would have made sense had it happened 45 minutes earlier, and there's no attempt to explain why it didn't happen then.  But the film is head and shoulders above what we usually see in this genre, and it's marked throughout by what appears to be a high degree of honesty.

Puncture will probably vanish from any theater near you in the next week or so.  But get it on your Netflix queue, and check for it in early 2012 to stream or record on your DVR.  It's worth the effort.

TIFF's Midnight Madness program is exactly what you think it is:  10 flat-out, unapologetic genre movies that premiere each night at midnight in front of a raucous crowd at the 1200-seat Ryerson Theatre.  In any given year, the Madness may include unexpected gems like last year's Insidious and 2006's Borat, interestingly weird pictures such as A Town Called Panic and Inside, and plenty that are just plan bad like John Carpenter's The Ward and Diablo Cody's Jennifer's Body.

This year, things kicked off with THE RAID, which is Indonesian but directed by Welshman Gareth Huw Evans.  I don't know that it'll ever get a mainstream US release--there's a limited American market for subtitled Indonesian action movies--but it could certainly get remade, and Evans may find his phone ringing.

The movie's concept is simple:  a group of cops have been sent into the apartment complex where a crime boss has his headquarters.  The idea is to get in and out fast with the villain in cuffs, before the residents (most of whom work for him) can catch on, but of course it doesn't work out that way.  The police are found out, and have to fight their way through practically every room of the building, as they struggle to stay alive long enough to reach his lair on the top floor and capture him.  As you'd expect, not all the cops are who they seem to be, and neither are all of the bad guys.

The Raid is a rudimentary movie (even the crime boss's surveillance system seems circa 1974), but the action is utterly non-stop; when the characters take a momentary breather a couple of times in the 101 minutes running time, you need the break as much as they do.  The violence is exhilaratingly extreme in the way that we're not supposed to admit enjoying (after a scene with a broken light bulb, Home Depot will never look the same), and Evans, who edited the film as well as directing, makes it all look remarkably real.  The picture doesn't hold up all the way through for the same reason that many martial arts movies don't:  we're essentially watching the same sequence several times over, and even with the spectacular talents of this cast, eventually they get a bit tiresome.  In addition, the lack of any but the most lazy characterizations takes a toll.

Still, after 2 serious festival movies largely concerned with the profound and complex subject of death and its effect on the living, there's something to be said for the guilty pleasure of a couple of hours watching dozens of people die for no reason other than entertainment.  The Raid is a lot of dumb fun.

There's a certain irony in the fact that, in this summer of Super 8 and its Spielberg rapture, the most successfully Spielbergian movie of the season is Marvel's CAPTAIN AMERICA:  THE FIRST AVENGER.  Its connection to Steven Spielberg is faint but important:  director Joe Johnston served as Art Director on both Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and later directed an episode of TV's Young Indiana Jones; not concidentally, this is something like the Indiana Jones 4 that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull never was, and although it has its limitations, Captain America is a surprisingly entertaining old-fashioned adventure.

One of the most engaging things about Captain America as a movie is that it's as unpretentious as a $150M+ giant superhero extravaganza can be.  The first section of the movie tells the story of Steve Rogers (Chris Evans, CG'd in the way of Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button) a 90-pound weakling but endlessly stout of heart, who longs to join the Army in World War II and fight against Nazis, but is rejected because of his physical frailty.  Steve finally runs into Dr. Erskine (Stanley Tucci, putting on a great show), a German refugee scientist who has a magic serum--not to mention his gorgeous aide Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell).  Johnston and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeeley take their time with this part of the story, and it pays off; although we know that Steve will turn into, well, Captain America, we get to know him first as a plucky underdog.  Even after the transformation, there's a witty sequence where the new Steve is turned into a pitchman for War Bonds (it's like the comedy version of Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers), complete with a musical production number by Alan Menken--by the time Steve gets to Europe, we're as longing for him to see battle as he is.

The huge action sequences, when they finally arrive, deliver in size and design, but they're kept for the most part on a human scale--like the Indiana Jones movies, they stay just this side of what an actual human being might be able to do.  Evans is less interesting as the full-fledged Captain than he was as the puny version, but he has a few moments where he gets to reveal the scrawny kid within, and the rest of the time he hits the stalwart buttons effectively.  And there are welcome supporting actors to perk things up between battles:  Tommy Lee Jones does his Tommy Lee Jones thing--it's like he invented macho snark--and Toby Jones is a junior evil Nazi.  Atwell, who's been doing very good work under the radar in projects like Woody Allen's little-seen Cassandra's Dream and the TV miniseries Pillars Of the Earth, has a snappy way with dialogue to go with her looks, and the gadget man on Captain America's team is Howard Stark, who would one day father Iron Man (ah, Marvel); he's played by Dominic Cooper, who'll soon be seen to much splashier advantage in The Devil's Double.   

The very clever production design by Rick Heinrichs creates a larger-than-life version of 1940s archetypes without calling too much attention to itself (as opposed, say, to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow's attempt to do the same thing):  tanks, motorcycles and planes that make sense in the World War II context but are convincingly a bit beyond reality.  The photography by Shelly Johnson, unfortunately, is obscured by a terrible 3D conversion that has little effect beyond badly smudging the original image--this is definitely a picture where audiences should try to save the money and find a 2D auditorium.

Where Captain America really falters is in its villain.  Hugo Weaver, who may be out of fantasy role inspiration now that he's done The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Transformers and The Wolfman, seemingly does a deliberate Christoph Waltz imitation as Red Skull; he's your basic raving super-Nazi (he even listens to Wagner), with a little of Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Voldemort's noselessness.  Red Skull never says or does anything interesting in the picture, and that lowers the stakes of the drama quite a bit; at this point in movie history, if you're going to scare us with a Nazi villain, it takes more than a red digital make-up job to do it.

Despite that central flaw, Captain America is a fun ride.  It's actually disappointing that in their zeal to get the character into next year's all-important Avengers conglomerate (consumer note:  sit through all 10 minutes of credits and you'll be rewarded with the teaser for next year's everyone-but-the-kitchen-sink epic), Marvel was in such a hurry to pull him out of the 1940s.  This retro fantasy could have made a nice variation from their usual formula, but it's seemingly a one-time effort; although we must all believe in the powers of Joss Whedon, he'll have his hands full juggling half a dozen heroes in Avengers, and the Captain's charm may not age well.  That, however, is next year's movie problem.