Movie Review: The Family Stone (2005)

A Christmas family comedy, The Family Stone features plastic people, events and emotions. A strong cast salvages a few moments of merriment.

Christmas time is approaching, and New York City-based businessman Everett Stone (Dermot Mulroney) and his new fiancée Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) travel to the Stone family home in Massachusetts for the Holidays. Meredith is highly strung, and is immediately a misfit within the Stone family dynamics. Everett's parents Sybil (Diane Keaton) and Kelly (Craig T. Nelson) are upbeat but dealing with Sybil's illness.

Meanwhile, Everett's siblings do little to make their guest feel welcome. Amy (Rachel McAdams) is the youngest and immediately harbours a bratty dislike towards Meredith; Thad (Tyrone Giordano) is deaf and gay and in a relationship with Patrick (Brian J. White), who is black; Susannah (Elizabeth Reaser) is pregnant. Only the laid back Ben (Luke Wilson) makes an effort to reach out. Meredith commits every social faux-pas in the book and grows increasingly frantic. She finally appeals to her sister Julie (Claire Danes) to ride to the rescue.

Directed and written by Thomas Bezucha, The Family Stone offers harmless entertainment filled with contrived situations all leading towards saccharine happily-ever-after resolutions with just a touch of seasonal melancholia. The film is undermined by an almost total absence of authenticity, with the cast struggling against a script seeking laughs but most often inducing groans.

Meredith's fish-out-of-water behaviour is sometimes funny but always unbelievably awkward. Stressed or not, a successful businesswoman should know better how to charm her way into a new environment, but here the script demands that she does nothing except practice aggressive foot-in-mouth. Equally, the adults of the Stone family behave like immature children around the new love of their eldest son and sibling.

The Family Stone is saved from a total loss by a willing cast. Sarah Jessica Parker plays against type and pulls off Meredith as a stuck-up and socially inept diva. Rachel McAdams gives young Amy an attitudinal edge, and Luke Wilson brings out the friendly black sheep of the family in Ben's observe-first, act-later approach to navigating his tumultuous family. Diane Keaton struggles for meaningful screen time, and Claire Danes ghosts into the movie as Julie with the preordained purpose of playing the romantic disruptor, because the script says so.

The Family Stone sometimes induces a tight smile, but rarely delivers a genuine note.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Turner And Hooch (1989)

A police comedy with a massive dog as the real star, Turner And Hooch finds plenty of funny moments thanks to the antics of a perpetually frothing canine, but suffers from a pretty flimsy plot.

In the fictional Sacramento suburb of Cypress Beach, young, single and extremely tidy police Detective Scott Turner (Tom Hanks) generally has nothing to do. He is getting ready to take a higher profile job in the big city, and is showing his replacement Detective David Sutton (Reginald VelJohnson) the ropes. The peace and quiet is suddenly shattered when old geezer Amos Reed (John McIntire) is killed after witnessing suspicious activity at the local fish processing plant. Amos' dog Hooch, a massive slobbering French Mastiff, is the only witness to the murder.

Scott reluctantly takes Hooch in as his new roommate, and the dog promptly proceeds to make a gargantuan mess out of Scott's house while chewing out his car. Scott starts a relationship with local veterinarian Dr. Emily Carson (Mare Winningham), while Hooch proves his worth by identifying a prime suspect in the murder case. With the dog's help, Scott, Sutton and their boss Chief Howard Hyde (Crag T. Nelson) close in on a conspiracy centred at the fish processing plant.

Directed by Roger Spottiswoode, Turner And Hootch proves the old W.C. Fields adage about never working with children or animals. There is a film here about some sort of crime, and Tom Hanks is as likeable as ever, but the only thing that matters is the big, uncoordinated, lovingly ugly Hooch (played by Beasley the Dog). The film is a showcase for the beast, and large chunks of running time are dedicated to Hooch being Hooch.

The best comic moments are fuelled by Turner's tidiness being an irresistible target for Hooch's antics. The dog methodically destroys anything that resembles neat, clean and orderly in Turner's life, and what he does not damage, he eats. The appeal of the film is in making Hooch lovable despite his unattractive drool and bulky clumsiness, and Spottiswoode succeeds in turning the dog into a sympathetic and loyal best friend.

As for the plot, it takes a back seat way at the far end of the bus. Both the nefarious activity at the fish processing plant and the romance between Turner and Emily are sketched in with thick lines, barely developed, and mainly serve to interrupt the fun with the dog.

Turner And Hooch is amiable entertainment, a woofing good time without much of a memorable bite.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: All The Right Moves (1983)

A coming of age sports drama, All The Right Moves benefits from a gritty small-town setting, excellent cinematography and a raw, unfiltered attitude towards themes of desperation and ambition. A dedicated Tom Cruise performance is an added bonus.

In tough economic times, the small steel town of Ampipe, Pennsylvania is slowly dying, with The American Pipe and Steel factory the only major employer. The high school students are mostly descendants of Eastern European immigrants, and the brighter students are anxious to secure college scholarships or face a dour future in a dwindling industry. The high school's football team is one avenue for a sports scholarship, and defensive back Stef Djordjevic (Cruise), entering his graduation year, dreams of doing enough on the football field to win the attention of a good college where his dream is to study engineering.

Others have similar ambitions, including teammate and best friend Brian (Chris Penn), while Stef's girlfriend Lisa (Lea Thompson) also wants to leave Ampipe to pursue studies in music. Even the school's football coach Nickerson (Craig T. Nelson) is angling for a better job as a college team defensive coordinator. With the football season drawing to a close and a big game against an undefeated rival coming up, Nickerson pushes his players to their limit, leading to an epic on-field performance but plenty of unintended consequences.

Directed by Michael Chapman with cinematography by Jan de Bont, All The Right Moves is an unblinking view of personal agendas in a forlorn town facing austere economic times. Beautifully filmed to capture the grit, grime bleakness and perpetual dampness of a steel town where the only certainty is a dead-end job, the film is all about individuals thinking of their own futures and plotting a lonely, anywhere-but-here course.

The Michael Kane script refuses all the easy short cuts, and indeed allows Stef to discover the many ways that he can sabotage his own prospects. The film is really about all the wrong moves, and for long stretches Stef, Brian and many of their teammates face the unappetizing prospect of staying in Ampipe for all the wrong reasons. There are unwanted surprises with girlfriends, blow-ups with the coach, relationship breakdowns, mistakes on the field, and acts of mischief and petty crime that derail the already tenuous plans to escape life in the steel factory.

The tension between Nickerson and his players is at the heart of the film, and Craig T. Nelson deserves a lot of credit for creating an unsympathetic, hard-nosed high school football coach just as desperate as his students to find something better. Nickerson pushes his players to perform and think as a team, but whether he actually cares or is using them to better his own prospects is open to interpretation. The film creates a premise where both the coach and the players are scheming beyond the collective, and yet everyone needs the team to be successful for personal reasons.

For a film set in a football milieu, there is just the one football game, and de Bont captures the action in coherent and exciting takes. Plenty of time is spent at the training field, a deglamourized place overtaken by mud where the coach cuts his players to size while injecting just enough encouragement to make his abuse barely palatable.

Released two months after Risky Business, All The Right Moves confirmed Cruise's stature as the hottest emerging star in Hollywood. As Stef Djordjevic Cruise builds on his persona as a young man more than capable of getting himself into a lot of trouble, and then having to methodically work his back into his starting position. Lea Thompson gives the girlfriend role a sharper edge than usual as she stands up for herself and avoids cliches and daydreams about happily ever after.

All The Right Moves suffers from a really dreadful 1980s music soundtrack, but otherwise makes a sharp turn towards a fulfilling story of concentrated struggles on and off the field.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Devil's Advocate (1997)

A supernatural courtroom drama, The Devil's Advocate takes a fiendish look at the world of high-stakes corporate law to find a literal hell on earth filled with souls for sale.

In Gainesville, Florida, Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves) is a handsome and cocky hot shot defence lawyer. Raised by his deeply religious single mother Alice (Judith Ivey) and married to the vivacious Mary Ann (Charlize Theron), Kevin has never lost a case. Facing his worst crisis as he defends a pervert school teacher against charges of sexual molestation, Kevin pauses in the men's room to gather his thoughts before proceeding to shred the testimony of the young victim. He secures a stunning not-guilty verdict.

Soon after, Kevin is recruited by a New York City law firm headed by John Milton (Al Pacino), and is quickly sucked into the lavish corporate culture alongside Milton's fellow executives Eddie Barzoon (Jeffrey Jones) and Christabella Andreoli (Connie Nielsen). But despite being handed the keys to a highly coveted apartment overlooking Central Park, Kevin's marriage to Mary Ann starts to suffer as she struggles to adapt to their new life. With Kevin's career soaring under Milton's mentorship, he is provided with the opportunity of a lifetime to defend real estate tycoon Alexander Cullen (Craig T. Nelson), accused of a triple murder. With his wife and marriage falling apart, the young lawyer begins to understand the price to be paid in return for tainted courtroom success.

Directed by Taylor Hackford and based on the Andrew Neiderman book, The Devil's Advocate is glossy fun. The mix of adult themes wrapped into a devil's agenda narrative and plonked into the world of criminal law could have been a righteous mess, but Hackford maintains good control, helped by a polished screenplay co-written by Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy.

The Devil's Advocate carries many parallels with the equally good legal thriller The Firm, and inflates the cost of morally vague legal quests to its ultimate conclusion. Hackford brings in Alice's religious extremism as the counterweight to devilish desires, and includes liberal doses of crime, sexuality and extremes of wealth to create the domain where evil thrives.

The film quickly gets down to the business of justice versus ethics, and the moral dilemma of proving innocence in a legal system that requires lawyers to stand by their clients no matter how putrid. It's a small step from there towards discarding principles of right and wrong and simply chasing the winning outcome at all costs, an apt description of selling the soul to maintain ever higher charge-out rates. If the devil and his acolytes were to choose a profession, defending the indefensible is a better choice than most.

The Devil's Advocate hurtles towards Kevin coming to terms with his own destiny from the perspective of Milton's reality, with Christabella equally thrust into a central role as far as humanity's future is concerned. In a wild climax Hackford does lose some discipline, with the lure of the supernatural and Pacino's tendencies to veer towards excess overpowering the more cerebral aspects of the material.

But to its credit, The Devil's Advocate does not shy away from the human responsibility to be accountable for each decision. As Milton insists to Kevin, there are choices at every step, and indeed Milton on several occasions offers up failure and withdrawal as viable options. It is up to Kevin to decide how far he will push himself into the moral morass; the devil just sets the stage for man's foibles to flourish.

In a career littered with performances that resemble sleep-walking, Keanu Reeves is much more animated as Kevin Lomax, finally unshackling some passion and emotional depth. In her breakout role Charlize Theron is a revelation, the character of Mary Ann having the longest arc and traveling from joyous small-town wife to a big-city victim struggling with her husband's increasing work obsession and sinister colleagues.

Equally campy and creepy, The Devil's Advocate makes a compelling case for demonic entertainment.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Osterman Weekend (1983)

A muddled thriller and the final film directed by Sam Peckinpah, The Osterman Weekend has a weak script and distracted execution.

CIA agent Laurence Fassett (John Hurt) loses his wife to an assassination. His subsequent investigation leads him to uncover a Soviet spy network known as Omega, consisting of three former college classmates: plastic surgeon Richard Tremayne (Dennis Hopper), stock trader Joseph Cardone (Chris Sarandon) and television producer with radical tendencies Bernie Osterman (Craig T. Nelson). Fassett convinces CIA director Maxwell Danforth (Burt Lancaster) that he can turn at least one of the spies into a double agent, with the help of controversial television journalist John Tanner (Rutger Hauer), also a former classmate of the men.

Fassett and Danforth lean on Tanner and cajole him into helping out with the plot. On a weekend when the Omega three are converging at Tanner's secluded house with their wives, Fassett wires the place up with numerous cameras and microphones. From a command post in the woods Fassett then orchestrates mind games against the spies to try to unhinge them and get at least one of them to consider becoming a double. But all is not what it seems, and before the weekend is over Tanner's family will be endangered.

Other than a top notch cast in decent form, not much about The Osterman Weekend works. Based on a Robert Ludlum novel, the film was a B-production that gained unexpected, and as it turned out, undeserved cachet when Peckinpah signed on as director, despite his failing health. By then considered a washed-up force, Peckinpah accepted the opportunity to restart his career, which led to many star names signing on to the project.

They need not have bothered. The script is mostly stuck in the early 1970s (the book was published in 1972), when the theme of surveillance was fresh and scary and captured in a spate of films like The Conversation and The Anderson Tapes. Here Peckinpah takes advantage of one more decade of sexual liberation on the screen by injecting plenty of scenes of bedroom frolicking as captured by hidden cameras, but it's all a sideshow that serves to needlessly distract from an already convoluted premise. Merete Van Kamp (Fassett's wife), Meg Foster (Tanner's wife), Helen Shaver (Tremayne's frequently drugged wife) and Cassie Yates (Cardone's wife) take turns appearing in various stages of undress, and it's almost all gratuitous.

But at least the sex and nudity are understandable as exploitation. The spy versus spy script is almost beyond comprehension, a victim of a lazy adaptation by Alan Sharp, perhaps grappling with weak source material. The reasons behind the central assassination of Fassett's wife are glossed over. The actual crimes committed by the Omega threesome are never explained. What proves to be incredibly sloppy approval from Danforth for Fassett to proceed with his high-risk, well-resourced mission turns out to be an inexcusable gaping hole.

When the bullets start flying and the violence escalates, the film offers middle-aged white collar men who are suddenly experts at combat and exceptional survival skills. And Tanner's profession as a hard-hitting, in-your-face journalist and interviewer exposing military cover-ups awkwardly mixes in an altogether dissonant tone that simply does not fit with the rest of the film's theme.

There is enough talent in the cast to ensure that The Osterman Weekend is not a total loss, with John Hurt committed in the most complex role as the emotionally wounded agent Fassett. Rutger Hauer, in the midst of his career purple patch, Craig T. Nelson, despite a bit of a ridiculous moustache, and a stodgy Lancaster are all serviceable.

True to form the project ended with Peckinpah embroiled in a battle with the producers, who wrestled control of the final cut and re-edited the film to try and improve legibility. By the end of 1984 Peckinpah was dead, aged 59. The Osterman Weekend is mess of a final note to end a career on, but perhaps also a most appropriate one.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

The Movies Of Craig T. Nelson

All movies starring Craig T. Nelson and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

...And Justice For All (1979)

Private Benjamin (1980)

Stir Crazy (1980)

Poltergeist (1982)

All The Right Moves (1983)

The Osterman Weekend (1983)

Silkwood (1983)

The Killing Fields (1984)

Turner And Hooch (1989)

The Devil's Advocate (1997)

Wag The Dog (1997, uncredited)

The Family Stone (2005)

The Proposal (2009)

The Company Men (2010)

Soul Surfer (2011)

Gold (2016)

Book Club (2018)

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: The Company Men (2010)

A corporate downsizing drama, The Company Men faithfully reveals the trauma caused by a contracting economy. The film works as a straightforward chronicle but without capturing any emotional resonance.

In a suburb of Boston, Global Transportation Systems (GTX) is a large corporation specializing in shipbuilding. With the great economic recession in full swing, business is down, the firm's share price is being hammered, and management responds with plant closures and brutal staffing cuts. CEO James Salinger (Craig T. Nelson) and his HR manager Sally Wilcox (Maria Bello) set their sights on the underperforming division run by Salinger's longtime friend and first employee Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones).

While McClary survives the cuts along with veteran salesperson Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper), the casualties include young and ambitious marketing executive Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck), who has an MBA, a large house, a larger mortgage, a Porsche, golf club membership, wife Maggie (Rosemarie DeWitt) and two kids. Bobby struggles to come to terms with the seismic impact to his personal life, and refuses to accept the economic crisis that has descended on his household. But with months passing and no prospects for another corporate job, he has to seriously consider accepting the humiliating offer from his brother in-law Jack (Kevin Costner) to help out on a construction site. Meanwhile, back at GTX, the rift between the considerate Gene and the much more ruthless James grows wider, as another round of cuts looms.

The Company Man has sincere intentions to delve into the human cost of job losses. Writer / director (and co-producer) John Wells does a fine job of looking at the carnage from all perspectives, including the people at the top pulling the trigger (Salinger and Sally); the senior manager caught in the guilt-drenched middle (Gene), the susceptible old-timer (Phil), the young, relatively cheap early victim (Bobby), and the blue collar worker all too familiar with hard times (Jack). The main focus is on Bobby, but The Company Men gives each of the main characters the opportunity to tell a distinctive story.

And through Bobby's story The Company Men does question the priorities of the young and ambitious, as wealth is translated into a mountain of debt that leaves no buffer. A smaller house, a practical car, and less golf would have allowed Bobby to ride out the recession in better shape. At the top, the rich find the ways to get richer. Salinger's reward for initiating deep cuts is an improved share price and the opportunity to sell the company and cash in on a new fortune.

But while the film functions smoothly, it never latches onto an emotional vein. Unlike Up In The Air (2009), The Company Men does not get under the skin of any of the protagonists, and remains a superficial if well-meaning study of people struggling through a crisis. Almost mechanically, Bobby goes through the academic stages of anger, denial, and dejection before being picked up by his wife Maggie once he reaches rock-bottom. Gene demonstrates why he is not the CEO of GTX by displaying too much caring for people rather than share price. And Phil represents the most exposed corporate soldier, the loyal employee who worked his way up, but has been stagnant for a long time and is now too old to be re-trainable. All good stories that unfold with integrity, but in the context of an imploding economy, all also rather predictable, and Wells doesn't find too many new angles to explore.

The cast of dependable stalwarts is consistently good, and while Affleck, Jones, Nelson and Cooper perform admirably with no surprises, Kevin Costner and Rosemarie DeWitt grab the opportunity to shine in excellent supporting roles.

With their company exposed to an economic crisis, all of The Company Men will experience tumultuous losses. For most of the men the pain is raw and visible. And those who emerge from the crisis with much greater material wealth and little empathy for the misfortune of others have actually suffered most of all. They have lost their soul, although they may not know it.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.