21 Nov 2014

Compound Fractured: "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1"

By Mike Schulz

Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part ITHE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY, PART 1

Like its immediate predecessor Catching Fire, director Francis Lawrence's The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 is reasonably gripping and rarely dull, although its presentation - as was bound to happen - does make the movie feel less like a satisfying two-hour entertainment than the not-bad first half of a much better four-hour entertainment. (Or five-hour entertainment, depending on how plushly Lawrence and Lionsgate pad the goodbye in next year's Part 2.) But I was really put off by one moment in the film, which found Woody Harrelson's Haymitch complaining that the makeup worn by Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss needed to be scrubbed off, as it was making the young warrior look 35. The line was amusing and Haymitch wasn't wrong, but why wasn't anyone bothered that the rest of Mockingjay 1 was making her look 13?

22 Jun 2014

Under the Streetlamp: "Jersey Boys" and "Think Like a Man Too"

By Mike Schulz

Vincent Piazza, Erich Bergen, John Llyod Young, and Michael Lomenda in Jersey BoysJERSEY BOYS

Jersey Boys, Clint Eastwood's film version of 2005's still-running Broadway smash, is a big, bizarre, cornball, clever, terrible, wonderful movie. It's hard to fathom what, beyond its inherent appeal, made Eastwood want to take on the project; this bio-musical about 1960s pop sensations the Four Seasons seems so clearly designed for Scorsese that's it's almost some kind of joke that it instead wound up in the hands of a man who, stylistically and temperamentally, is Scorsese's polar opposite. Yet somehow, astonishingly, the damned thing works. Its parts may be stronger than the whole - at least if you're allowed to cherry-pick the parts - but the film is affecting and entertaining and alive, and exudes more sheer joy than any other title on Eastwood's 43-year directing résumé.

21 Apr 2014

Near-Def Experience: "Heaven Is for Real," "Transcendence," "Bears," and "A Haunted House 2"

By Mike Schulz

Greg Kinnear and Kelly Reilly in Heaven Is for RealHEAVEN IS FOR REAL

So far this year, audiences for faith-based films at the multiplex have been treated to Son of God, God's Not Dead, and Noah, and now there's director Randall Wallace's Heaven Is for Real to add to the mix. Have the Hollywood powers-that-be heard something about an imminent Rapture that the rest of us haven't? Should I now be feeling awkward and guilty about my raucous laughter at This Is the End?

01 Mar 2014

Airport '14: "Non-Stop" and "Son of God"

By Mike Schulz

Liam Neeson in Non-StopNON-STOP

Every Academy Awards season, the idea of adding a Best Casting category appears to gain some traction among film journalists and professionals. (This past autumn saw the limited release of a documentary - Tom Donahue's Casting by - devoted to the subject, and Woody Allen, whom one would've thought indifferent to the Oscars at best, even wrote an open letter to the Hollywood Reporter in support of a casting trophy.) I'm personally fine with restricting the ceremony to the two dozen categories we do have, but if such recognition were to be included, voters could do worse than to consider Amanda Mackey and Cathy Sandrich Galfond - casting directors for the enjoyably ludicrous Non-Stop - for the prize. To be sure, it doesn't take much wit to suggest that Liam Neeson play a grieving alcoholic with a bad temper and a gun. But casting, as two beleaguered flight attendants, 12 Years a Slave's abused slave Patsey opposite Downton Abbey's rigid Lady Mary? Now that's witty.

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