Movie Review: Game Night

It’s a movie truth universally acknowledged that while the parents are away, the kids will play – more specifically, that the house will get trashed beyond repair in a wild party, and the parents’ prized sports car will be taken out of the garage and wrecked in a high speed car chase. In “Risky Business,” Tom Cruise’s movie parents hit the trifecta for not only did the first two occur, but mom’s cherished Faberge egg was nicked and then developed a crack on the way to being retrieved by her son before the folks returned. In John Francis Daley’s just-released “Game Night,” the trio of house/car/Faberge egg gets demolished on the way to the main characters (Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams) learning their life lessons, but that is the risk you take being a movie character.

In “Game Night,” Jason and Rachel play an insanely competitive but much-in-love couple who have been trying to conceive with zero luck. Their doctor suggests that perhaps it’s the stress of this that’s causing problems, when Rachel brings up the fact that Jason has always been competitive with his far-more-successful brother (Kyle Chandler). Jason scoffs at this, but we see the tension lines forming when the doctor asks if Kyle is single. The couple then goes shopping for munchies for their next game night, which is a weekly ritual attended by their friends who include Billy Magnussen (who always brings a different dim-witted but attractive date), and husband-and-wife team of Lamorne Morris and Kylie Bunbury. After Kyle shows up in town with the sports car that Jason’s always dreamed of buying and promises to host a game night in which the winner will take home the car, the players gather expectantly with Billy bringing in a “ringer” played by Sharon Horgan. The twist is that real actors have been hired to simulate a kidnapping, and on the way to solving the “crime,” no one will know what is real and what isn’t.

The actors (or are they?) are scoffed at in the beginning when thugs burst in and manage to subdue Kyle after a dramatic fight. Once the three pairs receive their clues and start navigating, however, the line between reality and fantasy begins to blur. Eventually, Rachel who is very bright when it comes to imagining all the ways in which the “game” is fake but forgets an important movie rule, mistakes a real gun for a fake one and injures her partner. After that, the players realize that they may be playing with fire, so they all head over to Jason’s and Rachel’s creepy neighbor’s (Jesse Plemons) house. Jesse, who is a cop who used to attend Game Night before his divorce, and who has already dropped ten pound hints about how much he would like to come back, is a pain, but he does possess a computer with FBI-type info. It turns out – surprise! – that whoever is orchestrating the game is not as in charge as he (or she) believes, so things get progressively scarier and then not on the way to the finish line.

I won’t reveal who ultimately is playing who, but the movie is very funny and leaves the door open for a sequel. Jesse is excellent as the rather robotic police officer who plays a more key role than either Jason and Rachel expect. I’m not sure the potential franchise would be as big a hit as “Horrible Bosses,” but judging from the positive reaction in my theater, perhaps it would be worth a shot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Movie Review: Spotlight

Between “Black Mass,” and the recently released “Spotlight,” Boston and its surrounding area does not emerge looking like a particularly pleasant place in which to live. Although the first is a movie about mobsters and the second about pedophile priests, the two share similarities: multiple scenes of people threatening/bribing each other and characters who defend their actions when backed in a corner by blurting out the old chestnut, “I was just doing my job.” Fortunately, the Boston Globe “Spotlight” team (Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, John Slattery and headed by Liev Schreiber as the new Globe editor) are on the side of the victims, in composing a story which will prove that there are more than just a few “bad apples” and something is truly rotten in the Catholic Church diocese.

The movie both fits and deviates from the typical Hollywood portrayal of a whistleblower. Stage One is when we meet the players. Sometimes we get background on their families, but here, the focus is mostly on the journalists themselves. We do learn that except for Liev, who is Jewish, they are all more or less lapsed Catholics. Some, like Rachel’s character, attend church with a devout relative; others, like Mark’s character, have moved away from the Church but haven’t completely given up the idea of abandoning it altogether. At the beginning of the movie, the Spotlight team is attempting to come up with its next big story, and when they hear about a possible scandal involving sexual allegations and what appears to be a church-wide cover-up of the perps, they scrap the one they’re currently looking at and take that one instead. Though there have been attempts by others to give the Globe this information before, for various reasons, it’s not been taken seriously. However, that’s about to change.

Stage Two is the information gathering stage where the characters sense that something is not entirely on the up-and-up but have no idea of the breadth and depth of the evil involved. At first, the team, given information by someone who’s been studying deviant behavior in the priesthood since the sixties, learns that six percent of priests “act out.” They do the math and decide it’s about 13 in Boston; but once they start interviews and probe further, they realize that number is woefully low. As a character points out, it often takes an outsider to start focusing on an issue that’s been a problem for a long time but not addressed. While none of the Spotlight team are ex-employees of a company or, like Julia Roberts in “Erin Brockovich,” someone who is an outsider at her job, they are, as reporters, used to probing into potential hornets nests and aren’t about to be deterred by scare tactics, in order to unearth the truth.

Stage Three is when the characters start experiencing conflict with the source they are attempting to expose. There’s no dramatic bullets in the mailbox or bricks through the window, but the Catholic Church has been assiduously blocking attempts by the victims (and some insiders) to make the allegations public. as well as the fact that their approach has been to transfer priests to a different parish. There’s lawyers who won’t talk because they don’t want to be disbarred, victims who are conflicted about speaking publicly, and a whole other slew of difficulties in obtaining the right documents. But of course, they persist.

Stage Four is the come-uppance phase where hopefully, the bad guys finally get what’s coming to them. Like many movies, however, your enthusiasm is tempered by follow up information presented in an epilogue, in which you learn that sadly, the bad guys are still sort of doing whatever it is they shouldn’t be. Still, like Mark’s character, it may be hard to attend church this holiday season and watch the children’s choir perform with the same kind of perspective. Is faith a stronger force than the law as one priest claims in the movie? Hopefully, not in this case. As Mark’s character puts it, “It could have been me, it could have been you, it could have been any of us.”

A Look Back: Mean Girls

Re-watching a teen movie set at least a decade ago is like looking into a yearbook from that period. Not only do you get to giggle at the outdated hairstyles, fashion and slang, but you aget to see So-and-So before they became big; derailed their life with drugs, politically incorrect tirades or shoplifting; or married Mr./Ms. A-Lister and adopted a child from every continent. There’s also the thrill of spotting that actor who is now a huge deal, but in this movie, is just relegated to watching the hero/heroine glide down the hall in slo-mo (don’t worry, your turn will come).

“Mean Girls,” which came out just before the social media explosion in popularity, is that rare movie that isn’t dumbed down for its adolescence audience – and happens to feature teen girls, not boys.  It is based on a nonfiction book by Rosalind Wiseman, which consists mostly of interviews with real life teens. There is no one named Cady Heron in the book; no clique called the Plastics; no math competition or sympathetic math teacher; clueless principal; Burn Book high jinks, or prom.  Some of the subjects’ lines make it into the movie, but they are tweaked to be more Hollywood-script friendly.  But the plot – in which a homeschooled teen who originally lived in Africa, attends American public high school for the first time, become entangled with a trio of popular girls, and eventually learns there is merit in being herself, appears to be fiction.  The one thing the book and the movie both get right, however, is that being a high school student can be, as the heroine puts it, like being a shark tank, albeit with some very attractive sharks.

In the movie, Lindsay Lohan plays Cady, the aforementioned homeschooled teen, who has a rough first day of high school but manages to make a couple of allies her second day, who are Goth-ish Lizzy Caplan and her friend, Daniel Frazese, who is described as “too gay to function” more than once. They helpfully draw Lindsay a map of the lunchroom and who sits where, and clue her in to the presence of the Plastics, the A-list girl clique, which consists of one Queen Bee (Rachel McAdams); one sycophant (Lacey Chabert) and their ditzy friend (Amanda Seyfried), who is so dense that she once asked Daniel how to spell “orange.”  Soon the Plastics notice Lindsay and invite her to sit with them at lunch (as long as she wears something pink).  Lindsay still remains friends with Lizzy and Daniel, however, which is good as the Plastics are aptly named.

Lizzy, who has a rocky history with Rachel, manages to persuade Lindsay to sabotage Rachel and her group, after Lindsay has her own conflict with Rachel. The revenge is multi-tiered and involves a Swedish power bar and a “Burn Book,” which is basically what it sounds like.  Eventually, Rachel is exposed for the witch she is, but Lindsay is also exposed as being vindictive.  There is repentance and the acquiring of life lessons, but every time the movie threatens to veer too close to stereotype territory, something comes along to yank it away.  (Example: One girl tearfully laments that she wishes everyone could just get along – but then is revealed to not even attend the school.)

Directed by Mark Waters with a screenplay by Tina Fey (who also plays the math teacher), “Mean Girls” takes deadly aim at topics like public school sex education; parents who attempt to be their child’s best friend; and the generation gap (“Sometimes old people make jokes,” Tina explains straight-faced to Lizzy and Daniel at one point.)  There are a lot of “Saturday Night Live” alums, including Amy Poehler, who plays the “fun mom.” Looking back, it may seem to be set in an antiquated era (there’s hardly a cell or a laptop to be found), but its insights into “Girl World” are still relevant today.

Movie Review: Southpaw

“Southpaw” is, of course, the term for a left-handed athlete or just plain left-hander, which is one of the more positive terms, as “left-handed” translated from other languages often means something like clumsy, ill-mannered or possessed by the devil. However, as many have noticed pre-release, the star of the new movie, Jake Gyllenhaal, is right-handed, so where does the title meaning come in? The truth is that it comes from a training tip from Jake’s movie coach, Forest Whitaker, who is helping him get his groove back and earn redemption in the Big Match, but it’s slipped in during a montage when he advises Jake to fight well, in the southpaw stance. We never get a full conversation, unaccompanied by music encouraging the star to put one foot in front of the other, about the pros and cons of this training technique, but it does – spoiler – come in handy in the end. Now this is also a metaphor for life, but still, it’s an awfully casual way to explain what is supposed to be the movie title. Maybe they just had a struggle coming up with a name in the first place and wound up picking one at random that didn’t sound too terrible.

If you’ve seen the trailer for “Southpaw,” you’ve seen all the main spoilers, so nothing in this review will come as a great surprise.  Jake plays (heavy symbolism alert) boxer Billy Hope, who grew up in a Hell’s Kitchen orphanage and married his childhood sweetheart (Rachel McAdams).  Now he’s mega-successful, has a lot of friends and admirers, and a mansion, multiple cars, etc.  He also has a precocious young daughter, Oona Laurence, who is a good actress but still left me wondering how Jake and Rachel could produce such an average looking child.  Anyway, when the movie opens, Jake isn’t doing quite as well in his matches as his wife thinks.  She believes he should back off and take a break, but there’s this rival, the arrogant, trash talking Miguel (played also by an actor named Miguel Gomez) who keeps popping up and taunting Jake about being too cowardly to fight him.  So the stage is set for a tragedy, which leaves Jake without his assets, many of his friends, the respect of the boxing community, his wife, and finally, his daughter, who is taken into custody by child protective services, so he can get his act together.

As mentioned, Jake takes refuge at a down-at-the-heels gym, owned and run by Forest Whitaker, who sees himself (in sports movie tradition) as a mentor to disadvantaged minority youths, as well as a coach.  To help Jake satisfy the requirements needed to release Oona, he gives him a menial job and begins to train him.  There’s no professional pressure at first, as Jake has been suspended, but soon fate comes knocking, and regulations be damned, a charity match is arranged between Jake and another guy, and then (due to much improved behavior) Jake is now free to face his big rival in the ring.  After Jake proves his humility by being nice to the youths at the gym and painting both sides of the fence so to speak, he is ready to train, montage-style, – and perhaps win.

As plenty of reviewers have already noted, this is a very formulaic sports movie with no surprising plot twists to speak of.   There is a lot of cussing (at least five f-bombs in that many minutes in the opening scene) and amazingly enough, a lot of violence.  At one point, Jake’s now former manager advises his flunkies to follow Jake out and make sure he doesn’t destroy anything on the way; this is about all the humor you’re going to find in the movie.  As he did in “Nightcrawler,” Jake also gets to express emotional anguish by smashing a mirror, which seems to be a popular way for actors to demonstrate that they are in pain, when their character is too inarticulate to convey this through words.  I felt the director overdid the panning to the daughter during Jake’s Big Match in order to generate heart-warmingness, but if you like boxing, this is a perfectly good movie to spend a couple hours watching.