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Joy: Mini-review

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Jennifer Lawrence

Jennifer Lawrence is not exactly jumping with joy

B-If you want to see how David O. Russell‘s Joy went wrong, despite the presence of three of his favorite performers in the cast, look no further than the writing credits. They credit Joy‘s screenplay to Russell, but, more importantly, the story to Annie Mumolo and Russell. Translated into English, that means that Russell rewrote Mumalo’s biodrama of a scrappy inventor and entrepreneur and turned it into a mess, somewhat redeemed by a typically solid performance by Jennifer Lawrence.

Lawrence plays Joy Mangano (although her last name is never mentioned in the film), the sole voice of sanity in a highly dysfunctional household. She invents a revolutionary easy-wring mop that becomes a huge success after she persuades QVC executive Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper) to let her pitch the mop on cable television. Despite booming sales, however, a dispute over patent rights to the mop threatens to cost Joy the company she built from scratch. 

Annie Mumolo wrote the original screenplay of Joy after careful research and consultation with Joy Mangano, but Fox executives thought the script needed more character development, so they turned it over to Russell for revision. The director didn’t so much develop character as invent it. Joy’s father (Robert De Niro) becomes a hapless nitwit living in the family basement along with her ex-husband (Edgar Ramirez), a failed lounge singer. Joy’s mother (Virginia Madsen) lives upstairs and spends all day watching soap operas. Russell thus turns a struggling real life lower middle class household into a version of Cinderella set in a mental institution. Russell aims for whimsy by turning these various relatives into cartoons, but the whimsical scenes rarely work, and they clash with the underlying reality. The closer the movie comes to reality, as in the scene below (one of the best in the film) at the QVC studio, the better it succeeds. Throughout all this, Jennifer Lawrence is again superb. Even though she often appears to be fighting the script as much as the forces opposing her, nobody plays resolute determination like Lawrence. Plus, in a role that is little more than a cameo, Bradley Cooper turns on his charm and glides through it as a fairy godfather who looks like Prince Charming. The first half of Joy is often listless and dragging, but enough scenes work in the more reality-based second half to give theater goers at least a bit of joy for their money.
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Burnt: Mini-review

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Bradley Cooper

Bradley Cooper is a hotter dish than anything he prepares in Burnt

CBradley Cooper is such a perfect romantic leading man that moviemakers apparently feel that his presence alone is enough to make a successful film. As in this summer’s Aloha, the producers of Burnt simply put Cooper in an exotic setting and surround him with a solid supporting cast and hope for a good movie. The actual result, however, is like mixing together all the ingredients for a cake and then forgetting to turn on the oven.

In Burnt, Cooper plays Adam Jones, a former top chef whose temper and substance abuse problems ruined his career in Paris and sent him into hiding. Now sober, he sets his sights on London instead and prevails upon the owners of a posh hotel to let him take over its fine restaurant. Adam’s team includes a couple of his old associates, the restaurant’s current Maitre d’, Tony (Daniel Bruhl), and fellow chef Michel (Omar Sy). Among the newcomers he adds are extremely reluctant single mother Helene (Sienna Miller). Adam’s goal: to earn the highly coveted third Michelin star.

Gordon Ramsay was a technical consultant on Burnt and at times the movie seems like his personal fantasy. Director John Wells spends an inordinate amount of time indulging in food porn, showing montage after montage of all sorts of delectable edibles being purchased, prepared, cooked, and served. The camera also follows Adam as he visits all manner of restaurants (including a Burger King) so he can expound on his vision of cooking (“People eat because they’re hungry. I want to make food that makes people stop eating.”) When Adam actually gets around to cooking, however, he’s still the same arrogant, bullying jerk he was before. Even though the restaurant sequences are very well staged, director Wells spends so much time on the minutiae of haute cuisine and so little time on the actual character of Adam that the film’s rather predictable romantic and emotional developments feel rushed and perfunctory. Worse, the scenes in Burnt in which Adam acts the worst are actually the film’s best written. The audience could get 99% of the entertainment value of Burnt in half the time by watching a Food Channel “making of” documentary instead. As an actual drama, Burnt is definitely undercooked and underwhelming. 
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Aloha: Mini-Review

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Bradley Cooper

Bradley Cooper won’t be headed back to the Oscars for his role in Aloha

C+Watch some parts of Aloha and it’s easy to see how writer/director Cameron Crowe could create movies like Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous. Watch the entire movie, however, and it’s easy to see how he’s become largely irrelevant in Hollywood in the last decade.

Actually, Crowe has been working on Aloha for nearly a decade through numerous cast and script changes. The finished product bears the mark of a project that’s been circulating since the Bush presidency. Brian Gilcrist (Bradley Cooper), a former Air Force whiz turned civilian contractor, is in Hawaii for a PR job that consists primarily of schmoozing some native Hawaiians into going along with a project that will allow billionaire Carson Welch (Bill Murray) to launch satellites into space from the island. The job also allows Brian to reconnect with former girlfriend Tracy Woodside (Rachel McAdams), now married to an Air Force officer (John Krasinski). Brian also makes some new connections with his Air Force liaison, Allison Ng (Emma Stone). 

Aloha bears the mark of a much longer film that was hastily edited down to a 105-minute running time. Key plot elements are unexplained or poorly explained, and characters’ personalities seem to change drastically from scene to scene. Alec Baldwin has three scenes in the movie as the commanding Air Force general, and he seems like three different people. The result is an at-times incomprehensible mess. To make matters worse, Stone (who’s supposed to be one-quarter Hawaiian) and Murray are badly miscast. However, Aloha is a mess with a lot of wonderful individual scenes such as Stone dancing with Murray or making music with some of the native Hawaiians. Cooper exudes his patented charm in several scenes with both Stone and McAdams, although he admittedly appears lost and befuddled in others. And even a miscast Bill Murray is fun to watch. All in all, about half of the movie consists of anywhere from good to almost magical scenes, including a great closing moment. Aloha is a movie that will be best enjoyed on video with the fast forward button handy to speed viewers through the messy scenes and linger on the good ones.
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Serena: Mini-Review

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Jennifer Lawrence

Jennifer Lawrence’s seemingly can’t-miss reteaming with Bradley Coooper does miss

CWhat do you get when you mix two of today’s hottest and most talented actors (with six Oscar nominations and one win this decade), an acclaimed European director, and some stunning mountainous scenery and cinematography? Surprisingly, in Serena, you get a film that largely squanders the talents of Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and director Susanne Bier on its near-direct route to video.

Serena is a period piece, set in the Smoky Mountains in the early 1930s (Czechoslovakia doubles for North Carolina here). Cooper is George Pemberton, owner of a lumber company that’s trying to clear as much timber as possible before the federal government takes over the land. He’s aided by his new wife Serena (Lawrence), who quickly proves to be far more than a trophy bride. Their goal is to move on to Brazil, where there’s far more timber land and far fewer people to complain about the environment. However, George’s past, both business and personal, threatens to catch up to him.

Serena is based on an acclaimed Southern Gothic novel, but, while there’s a lot of melodrama in the movie, there’s a lot of other disparate elements that never quite blend together. The film is in part a conflict between shady business interests and the local, easily exploited populace, but it also has some just plain weird mystic elements like a hunting guide (Rhys Ifans), who feels beholden to Serena and helps do her dirty bidding. Eventually, director Bier decides to make the film a period version of Macbeth. Lawrence does an excellent job in individual scenes, but her character’s personality and mood swing wildly from scene to scene without any real explanation. Cooper is far more laid back but is not given much to do from the script. The end product plays more like a series of scenes from an actors’ workshop and not a cohesive movie. As a result, as Serena builds to its lurid finale, the audience winds up detached instead of engrossed, and, judging by the movie’s eventual distribution fate, the studio detached itself from the underwhelming movie as well.
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The Norbit Factor

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Julianne Moore

Julianne Moore is still the odds on favorite for the Best Actress Oscar for Still Alice

Eddie Redmayne

Eddie Redmayne is in a tight battle for the Best Actor Oscar.

According to conventional wisdom, Julianne Moore has this year’s Best Actress Oscar sewed up for her riveting performance in Still Alice, while Eddie Redmayne is the favorite for his role in The Theory of Everything. Before you try to cash in on this year’s office Oscar pool however, you might want to remember back to 2007 when a dreadful stinker of a film named Norbit just might have derailed Eddie Murphy‘s chances at winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

Going into the Oscars that year, Murphy was on a roll. His performance in Dreamgirls was hailed as a career best (probably an accurate statement) and a sign that he had matured as an actor after a decade or more of cash grabs in various dreadful films. He had already won the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild award that year. Yet, when Rachel Weisz announced the winner, it was Alan Arkin (for Little Miss Sunshine) who wound up with the prize:
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