Movie Review: Dave (1993)

A mild comedy and low-key romance, Dave carries old-fashioned sweetness into the tale of a do-gooder who stumbles his way into presidential power.

United States President William Mitchell (Kevin Kline) is a heartless womanizer, and his marriage to Ellen (Sigourney Weaver) is a sham. His closest aides are Chief of Staff Bob Alexander (Frank Langella) and Communications Director Alan Reed (Kevin Dunn).

The good-hearted Dave Kovic (also Kline) works at a small-town temporary employment agency, and in his spare time impersonates the President at local events. Secret Service agent Duane Stevensen (Ving Rhames) spots Dave as a useful stand-in and recruits him for a walk-on appearance. 

When Mitchell is incapacitated by a stroke mid-coitus, Alexander identifies an opportunity to grab power by installing the impersonator as a puppet President. The naive Dave is duped into going along with the plan, and within a few weeks he improves the White House's public image through displays of humanity. But Dave then takes an interest in Ellen and starts to impose his views on policy decisions, undermining Alexander's agenda.

A liberal-leaning gentle satire of political machinations, Dave aims for comfortable smiles and simplifies the presidency to an almost dull routine of inconsequential appearances and bureaucratic meetings. Writer Gary Ross and director Ivan Reitman wander down the "if only a good man..." route, and emerge with a harmless - and toothless - tale of doing good by playing with a lonely kid and spending money on homeless shelters. 

Almost everything about Dave lands in the middle of the road. Alexander is the closest thing to a villain, but the worst he can come up with is a veto of a barely defined bill, and later abstract accusations of wrong-doing. The marital tension within the White House is defined by silence, and melts away on cue. The subsequent romance between Dave and Ellen barely warms the temperature to tepid levels.

Through it all Dave plays the out-of-place pragmatist getting to grips with his new surroundings and quick to cut through the nonsense of politics and towards doing the right thing. Kevin Kline spends most of the film in amiable mode as Dave, although the much shorter President Mitchell role offers better opportunities for venom. The cast also includes Laura Linney as an office assistant and the object of Mitchell's lust, Charles Grodin as an accountant and Dave's friend who helps balance the US budget in one night, and Ben Kingsley as the absent-until-the-third-act Vice President.

While the plot ambles along in an inconsequentially dreamy state, the sets look real. Reitman comfortably navigates replicas of White House exteriors and interiors (including the Oval Office) to create the illusion of location filming. 

A tolerable distraction, Dave reduces the presidency to a frivolous job, and treats it with fluffy innocence.



All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: All Good Things (2010)

A crime drama inspired by real events, All Good Things is a fascinating story hampered by an emotional void.

In 2003, David Marks (Ryan Gosling) is testifying in a courtroom, and events are revealed in flashback. In the early 1970s, Sanford Marks (Frank Langella) is a New York City real estate tycoon. His son David is a young man traumatized by the death of his mother when he was young, and now resisting his father's pressure to get involved in the family business. Instead, David marries aspiring medical student Katie McCarthy (Kirsten Dunst) and they relocate to Vermont and open the All Good Things country store.

But David eventually succumbs to his father's wishes and the newlyweds relocate to New York. A fissure develops between Katie and David when he denies her wish to start a family. They grow apart, and he withdraws into an incommunicative shell. The detachment turns to hostility, and over the years bad things start to happen to the people around David, including Katie, his friend Deborah Lehrman (Lily Rabe), and lonely old man Malvern Bump (Philip Baker Hall).

Director Andrew Jarecki steps away from documentaries but stays close to a version of reality, All Good Things inspired by the true story of Robert Durst. Co-writers Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling fictionalize the remarkable sequence of events resulting in two suspicious deaths and one missing person over several decades, all swirling around the troubled son of a real estate magnate.

With a quiet mood, a sense of dread, and good use of short and sharp flashbacks, the film is always compelling. But for a relatively brisk length of 101 minutes, the set-up takes a long time. Throughout the first half, David is generally sympathetic (with hints of distress) as a free-spirited scion pushing against a stern father. Once events move towards nefarious intentions, his switch to a withdrawn and mostly silent antagonist leaves behind a disorienting vacuum in the form of an expressionless plotter of evil.

This is no fault of Ryan Gosling, who embodies an enigmatic man descending into an unfortunately unspoken inner hell. It is left to Kirsten Dunst to provide a warm heart and soul, and the film turns cold once Katie is sidelined. But David's grotesque adventures continue, and a final chapter brings in sharp-shooting old codger Malvern Bump, a bizarre cross-dressing sub-plot, and a sudden rise in prominence for the previously barely relevant Deborah. Again the actual plot elements are engrossing, but by now also disjointed.

All Good Things fades towards disheartening resolutions. But the film's release triggered a series of subsequent milestones, including interviews, a documentary, and criminal charges, in a circular case of representative art re-influencing reality.



All Ace Black Blog Movie reviews are here. 

Movie Review: Frost/Nixon (2008)

A drama and character study, Frost/Nixon explores a battle of wits between a television personality and a disgraced politician. The duel provides a surprisingly potent foundation for a captivating narrative.

After President Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) resigns in 1974 as a result of the Watergate scandal, British celebrity talk show host David Frost (Michael Sheen) audaciously requests an interview. With Nixon now decamped to a California villa with an entourage of loyalists, his publicist Irving "Swifty" Lazar (Toby Jones) eventually agrees to the interview request in exchange for $600,000.

In preparation for the four two-hour taped sessions, Frost convenes a team of advisors including producer John Birt (Matthew Macfayden) and reporters/researchers Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) and James Reston (Sam Rockwell). But to Frost's surprise the major television networks pass on the opportunity to buy the rights to air the interview, forcing him to front all the expenses and in a scramble to find sponsors. The tapings start in 1977, with Nixon confident he can bat away any controversial questions and Frost eager to extract an acknowledgement of wrong doing from the disgraced former President.

Peter Morgan adapts his stage play for the big screen and succeeds at the arduous task of transforming a political interview featuring two egotistical characters into accessible drama. Without fully overcoming the suspicion of overblown importance, director Ron Howard squeezes tension from the quest to seek something resembling an apology, or maybe just a moment of human vulnerability, from the reviled figure of Richard Nixon. The drama works thanks in large part to Frank Langella draping the Nixon persona over his broad shoulders and projecting a fascinating combination of arrogance, denial and smarts.

Howard stages the interview preparations as the equivalent of two boxers training for a championship bout. Advisors, sparring sessions, commercial terms, sponsors, personalty analyses and likely points of attack and defence are charted and debated, occupying the film's first two thirds. Concurrently the two personalities are fleshed out, Frost inexperienced as a hard-nosed interviewer but with a megawatt smile and enough charm to light-up a studio, Nixon a wounded giant of a man still believing himself the smartest person in a room full of enablers, and yet to fully come to terms with his legacy.

Once the interviews start, the bout appears to be a mismatch. Drawing on decades of experience Nixon unsettles his inquisitor and turns every answer into a self-serving monologue, Frost unable to interject and pinned deep into his chair by the former President's oratory barrage. The success or failure of Frost's attempt to create compelling television hinges on the fourth and final two-hour interview session centred on Watergate, and the showman realizes it really is show time, only this time he has to work for it.

The outcome is a combination of history and dramatic licence, Howard and Langella doing enough to register a moment in television history entrenching the medium's power and potential.

In addition to Matthew Macfayden, Toby Jones, Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell, the cast also includes Kevin Bacon as Nixon's chief of staff Jack Brennan and Rebecca Hall as Frost's girlfriend Caroline. The supporting actors are all suitably lively but rarely venture beyond basic characterizations.

The production exudes quality and courage in tackling cerebral subject matter with complex protagonists. The topics are history and politics, but Frost/Nixon is intrinsically all about pushing risks to the point of career-defining success or spectacular failure.



All Ace Black Movie Blog Reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Trial Of The Chicago 7 (2020)

A courtroom drama based on real events, The Trial Of The Chicago 7 explores a legal assault on democratic principles by regressive but camouflaged ideology.

August 1968 is approaching and various groups of anti-Vietnam War protesters plan to descend on Chicago for the Democratic Party National Convention. The Mayor's office responds with a large police presence and a National Guard deployment. Five months later, the Nixon administration assumes power and new Attorney General Mitchell directs federal prosecutor Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to prosecute seven activists for the events of August 1968 on charges of cross-state conspiracy to invoke violence. 

With Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella) presiding, the defendants include Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong) of the Youth International Party, Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) of the Students for a Democratic Society, and Dave Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch) of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. They are represented by defence counsel William Kunstler (Mark Rylance). Bizarrely thrown into the same courtroom is Black Panthers leader Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), but without a lawyer to represent him.

From the outset the trial proceedings descend into farce, with Judge Hoffman obviously prejudiced against the defendants and taking every opportunity to exasperate Kunstler. And over the long trial duration, underlying tensions between Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden bubble to the surface.

While delving into events from a different societal era, The Trial Of The Chicago 7 provides piercing commentary on the misuse of power as a cautionary tale applicable in a modern context. Writer and director Aaron Sorkin deploys his usual sharp dialogue exchanges and witty retorts to enliven infamous court proceedings from the late 1960s, but the contemporary message hides in plain sight: one vindictive Attorney General and one intolerant judge are all it takes to threaten basic freedoms and destroy lives.

The script generally excels in both words and dynamism, skipping from pre-convention preparations straight to the trial, then circling back to the Chicago clashes between police and protesters in often gripping, tension-filled flashbacks as part of the testimony. The fine margins between protests and riots are defined by the briefest of words and actions and become key turning points in activist history.

But with the charges clearly trumped up and the judge on a one-man quest to pervert justice, this is starkly delineated right and wrong storytelling. The few arguments between Abbie Hoffman (revolution through dope and hippies!) and Tom Hayden (revolution through politics and policies!) don't disguise the absence of meaningful intrinsic moral dilemmas. Sorkin also displays a tendency to twiddle the manipulative knobs to eleven, and on a few occasions the music soars to schmaltzy registers while the courtroom histrionics abandon theatre in favour of opera.

The ensemble cast members contribute plenty of talent but enjoy few opportunities to shine. The defendants are efficiently drawn, although the characters are static. Mark Rylance as the lawyer Kunstler carries the heaviest dramatic weight, while Frank Langella's Judge Hoffman is the pantomime villain. Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the lead prosecutor starts strong but fades almost into insignificance, while Michael Keaton contributes a small but key role as a prominent defence witness. Important female roles are conspicuous by their absence.

It may be too well-intentioned, but The Trial Of The Chicago 7 nevertheless carries timeless lessons about the slippery slopes threatening all democracies: the system only functions when the guardians care enough to protect it.



All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Captain Fantastic (2016)

A drama about alternative fatherhood, Captain Fantastic enjoys moments of familial grit and humour, but backs away from challenging discourse.

Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) is the middle-aged father of six children, living off the grid in a forest, home schooling the kids while teaching them wilderness survival skills and espousing a left-wing, anti-establishment life philosophy. The gangly and socially awkward eldest son Bodevan (George MacKay) is accepted to top colleges but hesitant to broach the topic with his dad.

Ben's wife Leslie is bipolar and commits suicide in the hospital. Another son, Rellian (Nicholas Hamilton) blames his father for her death and is least convinced by his parents' lifestyle choice. Leslie's parents (Frank Langella and Ann Dowd) do not want Ben at the funeral, but he decides to crash the event anyway, setting out on an epic road trip with the kids on the family bus.

Carrying an echo from 1986's Mosquito Coast, Captain Fantastic explores the value of disassociating with what society has to offer and reverting back to an organic, waste-free, close-to-nature upbringing. Director and writer Matt Ross explores the fragility of fatherhood and creates an intriguing dynamic featuring a mostly close-knit family, a sensitive and ironically modern approach to parenting in rough surroundings, and children arriving at crossroads and forced to start making independent choices.

For the most part, Ross plays fair. This is neither a celebration nor condemnation of Ben's approach to life. In so much as his kids are better educated, physically fit and able to live off the land, they are also social misfits and deprived of interaction with friends. The eldest Bo is tongue-tied in front of girls, and in a funny sequence, disintegrates when an attractive girl flirts with him at an RV park during the road trip.

Along the way to the funeral Ross draws stark contrasts with a more traditional family as Ben makes a stop at the house of his sister Harper (Kathryn Hahn), her husband Dave (Steve Zahn) and their two kids. The two families may as well be from different planets, as neither the adults nor the children are able to communicate and function as an extended family.

The clash of cultures reaches a zenith with the deceased Leslie's parents, her wealthy father Jack in particular representing everything Ben stands against. The grieving father now wants his revenge by banishing the widowed husband, but Ben's peacefully rebellious psyche means he will not back down easily.

For all the good work created in establishing the premise, Captain Fantastic takes the wrong turn in its final act. Just when Ross appears to have built a sturdy foundation for a soul-searching conclusion, he takes the easy way out, completely jettisons two characters, and goes looking for a pat feel-good finale that avoids all difficult conversations.

Viggo Mortensen holds the film together in an understate performance, conveying the quiet anguish of loss and the creeping self-doubt as seemingly for the first time, Ben starts to witness the potential negative ramifications of his core beliefs. As he walks a fine line between hero and villain to his kids, Captain Fantastic is different in his approach but grappling with conflicts familiar to most dads.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Parts Per Billion (2014)

An end-of-the-world drama and romance, Parts Per Billion features three loosely connected storylines but adds up to less than the sum of its parts.

A war in the Middle East results in biological weapons being launched. Winds spread the lethal airborne germs, triggering massive death on a global scale. In Michigan, three couples await the arrival of the end, with flashbacks filling in their backstories.

Anna (Teresa Palmer) is intently following the news and the looming disaster increases the intensity of her jealous attachment to fiancé and musician Erik (Penn Badgley). He is calmer and less interested in world events. Lawyer Mia (Rosario Dawson) has a successful career, while her husband Len (Josh Hartnett) is underemployed but supportive. Their relationship is under stress because she did not discourage the advances of an office colleague. They take refuge in their sealed basement as the germs arrive.

The elderly Andy and Esther (Frank Langella and Gena Rowlands) are at the hospital for medical tests when the airborne contamination strikes. Oxygen masks help them survive. He is struggling with feelings of guilt, as he was paid large sums of money to help develop the biological weapons now destroying humanity. The three couples share some associations: Erik is the grandson of Andy and Esther, Mia successfully defended and acquitted Andy in a legal case, and Len's sister Sarah (Alexis Bledel) is a nurse looking after Esther at the hospital.

Sharing some of the same contaminant properties as 2011's Contagion, Parts Per Billion focuses more on people and less on events. Writer and director Brian Horiuchi is interested in the lives and loves of relatively ordinary people, and leaves the broader response to the crisis, if any, off screen. The six central characters are relatable, but far from profoundly interesting. They are also passive victims and observers rather than protagonists.

From the vantage point of the three couples, people are dying en masse, television reports reveal powerless elected officials fleeing, and opportunities for salvation or rescue are not even mentioned. A sealed basement and stocks of supplies offer hope for Mia and Len, but only if they can tolerate each other in confined surroundings. Oxygen masks extend life for Andy and Esther as long as they can find more canisters at the hospital. Anna and Erik just embrace the end with understandable anxiety but overall ambivalent acceptance.

With the title referring to the measure of contamination but also the miniscule relevance of every individual in a global context, it may be fully Horiuchi's intent to highlight the banal nature of life and predictable appreciation of love as the end comes into focus. But the movie suffers mightily from the absence of momentum. Other than small revelations about the couples, not much of anything actually happens over 98 minutes spread thin across three sub-stories. The repetitive shallow expressions of love, anger, frustration and regret struggle to leave an impression.

Parts Per Billion rides in on an evil wind, but exits in a whimper.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: 5 to 7 (2014)

A romantic drama, 5 to 7 explores a perfect love that just happens to thrive in the most imperfect of circumstances.

In New York City, Brian (Anton Yelchin) is a fledgling writer in his early twenties still waiting for his first publishing break. In front of the St. Regis Hotel he spots Arielle (Bérénice Marlohe), and it's love at first sight for both of them. Arielle is French and nine years older than Brian, which he does not mind. But with the relationship quickly turning serious, he is shocked when she reveals that she is contentedly married to diplomat Valéry (Lambert Wilson) and the mother of two young children.

Arielle educates Brian about the French custom of accepting affairs within marriage, as long as all parties are discreet and respectful, with the extramarital couple traditionally only meeting from 5 to 7 in the afternoon. Brian adapts to the concept, proceeds with the affair within the rules, and even gets to meet Valéry, his lover Jane (Olivia Thirlby), and Arielle's two children. The unusual arrangement completely rattles Brian's father Sam (Frank Langella), but his mother Arlene (Glenn Close) is more understanding. Brian's career catches a break, but as he falls ever so deeply in love with Arielle his delicate romantic arrangement starts to teeter.

Written and directed by Victor Levin, 5 to 7 benefits from exploring a romance with a few relatively original twists. While the New York City setting is familiar, Brian and Arielle navigate around differences in age and culture, her marital status and quite progressive views about the role of love and lovers in life. For long stretches Levin sustains interest not so much because of the love story, but because of where the romance fits into Arielle's life.

Despite the affair unfolding through Brian's eyes, Arielle emerges as a much more compelling character, and Bérénice Marlohe makes the film her own. Seemingly effortlessly, Arielle juggles the role of lover, mentor in affairs of the heart, wife and mother, and Levin succeeds in creating a captivating and stylish woman who can make a young man believe in alternative passion arrangements.

Less convincing is the concept of Arielle falling in love with Brian. Whatever charms the struggling writer possesses to turn the eye of a sophisticated woman are left off the screen, and Brian remains a rather whiny if infatuated young man. Anton Yelchin is dewy eyed but also miscast, unable to elevate the role beyond the star-struck American.

Brian's parents provide the comic relief and a contrast in bridges across the cultural divide. His mother Arlene is more than willing to give the liaison with a married woman every opportunity to thrive. His father Sam remains skeptical, barely tolerating Arielle's Frenchness, let alone the age difference and her marriage. Glenn Close and Frank Langella make for a fine married couple thriving in their eccentricities.

5 to 7 unravels in its final third, and the last 15 minutes are dominated by narration, Levin defaulting to describing rather than showing emotions. A great love can survive a lot, but it finally trips on a writer with too many words at his disposal.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Unknown (2011)

A slick and nimble thriller with all the requisite chases and stunts, Unknown distinguishes itself with a cunning story that gets progressively better as the film peels away the outer layers of characters and events.

American scientist Dr. Martin Harris (Liam Neeson) and his wife Liz (January Jones) fly into Berlin to attend a high profile international conference on biotechnology, hosted by Dr. Bressler (Sebastian Koch) and sponsored by Prince Shada (Mido Hamada). Upon arriving at the Hotel Adlon, Martin realizes that he forgot his briefcase at the airport. The ride back to the airport ends in disaster: a multi-vehicle crash launches the taxi off a bridge and into a river. Martin is saved from drowning by the taxi driver Gina (Diane Kruger), but loses consciousness and wakes up in hospital a few days later.

Martin rushes back to the Hotel Adlon and is shocked to find Liz insisting that she does not know him. Furthermore, Liz is with another man (Aidan Quinn) claiming to be Dr. Martin Harris. Thrown out into the street in a foreign city, Martin has to struggle to re-establish his identity, and he seeks the help of Gina as well as local private investigator Herr Jurgen (Bruno Ganz) and colleague Professor Cole (Frank Langella). Before long, Martin also finds himself the target of brutal assassins.

Unknown is a clever, high intensity thriller. It starts out on familiar stranger-in-a-strange-land territory, with many elements borrowed from movies like Frantic. But once the intricate plot behind the case of lost identity starts to reveal itself, Unknown is elevated to that unique sub-set of action movies where all the pieces of the puzzle fall smartly into place, and even the wilder stunt scenes are provided with context.

The script by Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwall makes the most of Berlin, with a specific tip of the hat to the history of the city as a Cold War cauldron, as Jurgen openly reveals himself to be a former Stasi agent, a cue for Unknown to take a pleasurable journey that links vintage spy methods with modern-day economic challenges and terrorist threats.

Liam Neeson is excellent in a role that would have been offered to Harrison Ford a decade earlier. Neeson is better at expressing tortured frustration, and conveys Martin's boiling emotions as he doggedly sets out to reclaim his identity. January Jones only needs to be the icy blond and she does it well, while Diane Kruger builds on her role in Inglourious Basterds with an affecting performance as an illegal immigrant who finds herself unwillingly pressed into service as Martin's guardian angel.

As it hurtles to an explosive climax, Unknown nails a most difficult stunt: the thriller that is thoughtful, exciting, and unpredictable.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.