Ed's Review Dot Com

Keep Your Head, Kingsgate Films, Worldview Entertainment,

Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Renner

Ewa Cybulska (Marion Cotillard) and her sister Magda arrive at Ellis Island in New York Harbor from Poland in 1921. Magda is immediately put in the hospital on the south end of the island in quarantine for 6 months due to lung problems. She will either be deported or released at the end of that period, but Ewa is not so lucky. Her Aunt and Uncle who are sponsoring her (since she has no money) did not show to pick her up, and Immigrations has determined that the address they provided was not a real address. So she is to be sent back home immediately. She runs into Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix) who is immediately smitten by her beauty and he pays off the Immigrations officials to allow her to be released into his custody. She is immediately put to work in the burlesque theater and forced into prostitution to earn the “money” needed to free her sister. But a love triangle with Emil (Jeremy Renner) knows as Orlando the Magician may be leading to tragedy for everyone.

This is a very dark period piece that was very surprisingly good. It is a very well told story, but very, very dark. The tragedy of arriving on hopes and dreams and nothing else, only to have your hopes dashed and to be hit with utter desperation. Marion Cotillard is excellent, as usual, in playing the very beautiful, intelligent, and capable young woman in a situation spinning out of her control. Joaquin Phoenix is an unusual character in real life, and is a very fitting choice for this Fagin type role from Oliver Twist of a good-hearted, but ruthless pimp taking advantage of the girls in his employ, and Jeremy Renner was also an excellent cast as faker magician for the poor folks Orlando who’s tricks are pretty good, and his intentions are pretty good, but he’s a mischievous fellow, that’s for sure. Basically this one of the best cast movies I have seen in a long while. It received a lot of notice at Cannes, but got only a limited release in the theaters. It did very well, though it was not on many screens, and it got amazing numbers considering the limited release, and I can see why. You don’t expect to come out from watching this film feeling good, that’s for sure, as it’s sad and depressing, but it’s such a well told and well developed story that it’s very entertaining and it will make you think about the lives and hardships people who arrived on a ship looking for a better life had to go through. How challenging in must have been for so many people. This was a very good film, and now it was just put up for streaming on NetFlix for April 2015, so it’s will be easy to find. It’s well worth checking out.

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New Regency Pictures, M Prods, Le Grisbi Productions,

Michael Keaton, Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts

Riggan Thompson (Michael Keaton) is a pretty much washed up movie star. He was a big hit in the blockbuster film Birdman playing a superhero name, imagine this! Birdman. But without anything much going on anymore, Riggan is slowly losing his mind, it seems. He has written a stage play, and sees it as the way to bring his name back into the limelight, but at the same time is fighting to keep his sanity. Things are not going very good with the show, and once he makes a key theater critic angry, she vows to destroy the show, Riggan may be going all the way towards insanity.

As the previews end and the theater darkens before the opening of “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life” a short feature begins with the title: “The Crimson Permanent Assurance”. This is an inside look at the internal workings of an accounting/insurance firm that embark on an epic battle between offices sailing their skyscraper offices down the streets of the city fighting to the death with each other. What a silly piece of film, and brilliant, mostly because it’s only a few minutes long, and it’s Monty Python absurd. Imagine a full length film about the daily operations of the internal mechanisms of an insurance office. That’s kind of what’s wrong with Birdman. I have always felt that if the Academy pats itself on the back with the honor of a picture of the year, it will naturally be something I’m going to hate. There have been many cases of the pure absurdity of Picture of the Year which I did not like. I didn’t hate this movie. But I was sorely disappointed in it.

First of all, let me say that I do like Michael Keaton. I really like some of his classic films (He will always be the Batman to me), but I also really enjoyed some of his films that everyone hated (Jack Frost anyone?). But he couldn’t save this self absorbed film about the internal workings of show business. This is probably really interesting to the folks in the business as they get what’s going on, but as an outsider, I feel like they just aren’t talking to me, and are not trying to bring me into their private story. This film starts and ends with the shot of a meteor burning across the sky crashing to Earth. Why? Perhaps this is symbolism of Birdman’s (Riggan’s) hopes and dreams and career and life and everything else, but maybe that’s my whole point. If a film is artistic, well shot, the story well told, and you are pulled into the story to where you don’t even remember you’re watching a movie, it’s a rich experience. This film is trying to tell you through every moment of the film that it’s “artful” and you should be proud of yourself for being intelligent enough to recognize that you are seeing a best picture film being crafted. At no time are you not annoyed at Riggan and the clowns he’s working with and the people around him. They have three excellent actresses in this film that are all wasted. They even throw Zach Galifianakis and Edward Norton out the window. Basically this is a long, tedious, extremely boring, pretentious attempt to tell a story to the entertainment business insiders that didn’t include me in the least. I didn’t get the point, and I didn’t even get the story. As to what happens in the end, it’s either a miracle, a segment out of A Beautiful Mind where Riggan is insane, or some kind of artsy symbolic thing that makes sense to Cannes Festival goers. For the everyman out there, I’m disappointed to say, skip this. It is not worth the effort to try to understand it.

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Emmett/Furla Films, K5 International, Aperture Entertainment,

Thomas Jane, Bruce Willis, Ambyr Childers

Julian Michaels (Bruce Willis) has developed an adult luxury resort where for a price you can experience anything you want. Filled with lifelike robots, you can murder, rape, and live just about any fantasy you can think of with impunity. But when one of the robots, Kelly (Ambry Childers) becomes self aware and begins to doubt the “life” she’s leading, she disappears and works with Roy (Thomas Jane) a cop who is set on shutting down Vice at any cost. The chase is on.

This film had a “WestWorld” feel to it. Sure enough, it’s based on the earlier 1973 Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin film that was a surprisingly unique and clever film that never garnered much attention. I have to be cautious, as this review of Vice may end up being more about WestWorld than it is about Vice. It’s too bad that the original never got the attention it deserved as it was an excellent film, but perhaps it was ahead of it’s time. Not many people today will have ever heard of it. I also understand a TV Series in the works for 2015 called WestWorld with the original concept of three lands, WestWorld, Medieval World, and RomanWorld will be dealt with. This is how the original story differs from Vice. Vice is one park which reminds me a lot of The Matrix as almost and alternate reality. There is very little division between Vice and the regular world. Also, WestWorld was fascinated by the technology of making a human-like android creature who looked, acted, and felt human, but experts can tell the difference because of the hands. Guns would not fire at a warm blooded creature so you were safe from getting into a gunfight with another human, but could kill robots all day if you wish. In Vice, we’re much more sophisticated in 2015 than we were in 1973, so we are supposed to just accept the differences, and the subtleties of the technology are just intended to be accepted. Instead it becomes very much more like Terminator or Total Recall which is a chase down that anything else. That is the major flaw I see in Vice, and it suffers because there is no emphasis on this intriguing vacation spot for the very rich, and is more about conquering the runaway robot that could bring everything down. But if anything, it really wanted to make me hunt down my old VHS tape of WestWorld and watch it again, and I can promise I’ll be watching for the series as soon as it comes out. Vice was ok, and was exciting and thrilling and all, but rather one dimensional which lacked the rich story that is should have had. So for a chase and shoot action adventure, give it a go, but if you ever have the chance, check out the Yul Brynner rampaging robot turned aware in the 1973 movie. It was a movie way ahead of it’s time.

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