People's sexiest man gets himself all dirty for his enjoyable football comedy. Elsewhere, our writer grooves to Paranoid Park's existential drift and gets creeped out by Death Cab for Cutie's new single.
The boxoffice story of the weekend was that Leatherheads was a huge commercial disappointment. But how did it do creatively?
Leatherheads (Universal Pictures)
As a filmmaker, George Clooney is now three-for-three: Like Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Good Night, and Good Luck before it, Leatherheads is a well-crafted, meticulously designed personal film whose ambition is stronger than its execution. Part screwball comedy, part commentary on the intersection of business and pleasure in sports, the film for a good long while is such a likable anachronism that I didn't mind if its pleasures were all gentle and understated. Renée Zellweger I can almost always live without – what would Cate Blanchett have done with such an obviously mannered '20s newspaper-reporter character? – but she's fine enough. And while I feared this was gonna be one big smirk-fest – everybody so pleased with themselves for making an old-fashioned Hollywood studio picture – it turns out Leatherheads is actually pretty elegant and restrained, for the most part, anyway. As you may have heard, the ending is both way too long and way too uncompelling, which is a bummer. But not fatal.
Paranoid Park (IFC)
By this point, you're either down with Gus Van Sant's series of minimalist movies or you aren't – Gerry, Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park aren't, in fact, the same film, but they are linked together tonally, guaranteeing that undergraduate cinema students will be writing about them for years to come, trying to suss out all their connections and related themes. Last Days suggested that Van Sant had gone to the well once too often , but Paranoid Park, while familiar in some regards, is very much a rejuvenation. The sense of teenage ennui visualized and dramatized – he did it in Elephant, too, but this new one will probably please those who objected to the, admittedly, queasy references to Columbine the last time around. The film's slightness is its charm and its limitation – deep down, Van Sant must know that he's not the first filmmaker to ponder disaffected youth at the mercy of absent parents and indifferent teachers. (And, really, are today’s kids in to Elliott Smith as much as my generation or Van Sant’s was?) But in another progression from Elephant, he's figured out how to get kids to sound like kids – not lobotomized victims that suit his agenda. There's a murder mystery in here, too, but it's part of the atmosphere. I don't unconditionally love this film, but I couldn't admire and respect it more. And I keep thinking about it.
The Bank Job (Lionsgate)
Where Ocean's Eleven got drunk on its style and panache, The Bank Job is all no-nonsense grit, blue-collar and tough. It also helps that it's based on a true story – and what parts have been invented or "modified," I don't want to know. But here it is: a top-to-bottom, front-to-back satisfying heist film whose perhaps least interesting part is the heist itself. Sort of like what Spike Lee was doing with Inside Man, The Bank Job savors intellect, character, detail – the preciseness of its execution is what gives you the big, warm grin as you're watching it. The performances aren't astounding (they're not supposed to be), but they're memorable – the name actors are straight-ahead solid, and the lesser-knowns are pungent without falling into types. It's probably a little too plot-heavy, and the ending reminds you that Jason Statham usually spends most of his screen time kicking people's rears in acrobatic ways. But this is one of those films that you think is so generic that you don't need to see it, until you actually see it and realize how original it is.
Smart People (opening April 11 from Miramax)
Smart People’s tagline is “Sometimes the smartest people have the most to learn.” That really tells you all you need to know about the film. It’s a banal life lesson and hardly a new idea for a piece of fiction – haven’t Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, and Albert Brooks banked their livelihood on milking such a revelation? Alas, here were go again, dragged along by solid performances from the likes of Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker into the muck of academia, watching as cranky authors learn to love and dysfunctional families discover the ties that bind. Ellen Page is also in it. I fear this woman may be permanently tied to her Juno persona . Winona Ryder had a bit of the same problem in her early career – she became the sardonic, smart young actress, and it got a bit constricting. Maybe I shouldn’t worry so much: Smart People is the sort of marginal film that shouldn’t be considered indicative of any of these actors’ skills.
Ben Gibbard has always pushed his smarts: You don’t write a (great) song influenced by Woody Allen’s Interiors if you’re not trying to impress people with your brain. This might make his band’s new song’s protracted instrumental intro seem needlessly indulgent, but after several listens, I’ve decided it’s appropriate. The song’s narrator is an obsessive, studying the object of his affection from a distance. He doesn’t sound well-balanced, that’s for sure. And so those four-and-a-half minutes of bass, piano and drums that drone on at the start mirror the uneasy crawl of a mind stuck in a rut. When Gibbard comes on to start singing, he doesn’t tweak his usually bookish vocal approach – it might take a while before you grasp that the narrator isn’t him. At least I hope it’s not. Cadence Weapon , Afterparty Babies (Anti-) It’s hard to judge a person by his on-record persona, especially when he goes by a nom de plume, but my hunch is that I would really like Rollie Pemberton. As Cadence Weapon, he’s everything the backpacker/indie-rap world is supposed to embody: thoughtful introspection, good jokes, a blue-collar approach to maintaining the purity of hip-hop, smart tunes. He hails from Canada, and according to the bio, he thought about journalism school. Just about every song on Afterparty Babies has at least one great line that’ll make you chuckle at its cleverness, but I’m not going to include any of them here in the hope you’ll seek out the album to hear for yourself – besides, his rhymes sound better backed by his music, which is noticeably more forceful than your typical backpacker’s.
Consumables is a biweekly overview of popular culture.
