Olympus Has Fallen: Questionable Plot Saved by a Genuine Bad@$$!

Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, Brooklyn’s Finest) has taken a flimsy script based on a frightening premise and transformed it into an action powerhouse.  While there is much that could be improved in this film, it is extremely entertaining action event complete with its own memorable Bad@$$!

Premise: White House is taken over by terrorists. Result: Two parts awesome action, two parts flimsy plot, and three parts total Bad@$$ protagonist and you got yourself a delicious film with only a slightly bitter aftertaste.

The film begins by establishing relationships, most importantly that of Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) to President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) and his son Connor (Finley Jacobsen).  And it is during this sequence that a tragedy strikes crushing that relationship and sending Banning into obscurity: to watch the White House from afar as he sits in the Treasury Department. Even his pleas to Secret Service Director Lynn Jacobs (Angela Bassett) go nowhere.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower: A Strong, if Limited, Look at the World Through the Eyes of Youth

With The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Writer Stephen Chbosky has adapted his acclaimed novel and directed a heart-wrenching narrative that explores the world through the eyes of a troubled teen.  This film, while still limited and ripe with shortcomings, manages to intricately describe the vivid, inadvertent madness of youth, as the world and its meaning shift like sand in the Sahara.

Premise: A troubled, shy freshman is befriends two seniors who welcome him to the real world. Result: A good memorable film that is beautiful and powerful while still somehow needing more work.

The adapted story follows Charlie (Logan Lerman) -a young boy with trouble fitting in- as he anonymously writes a series of letters to an unknown person, detailing his first year in High School.  Charlie is terrified of this change and his overly sensitive demeanor and debilitating shyness certainly do not make the transition any easier.  Oh, and his best friend Michael recently shot himself.

It is not long before he is targeted by bullies and made to feel even worse about himself; however, he does manage to meet two people on that first day: Patrick (Ezra Miller), a senior, and his English teacher, Mr. Anderson (Paul Rudd).

Both of these men, without realizing it, will have profound influence on Charlie, and the man he is to become.  But Charlie doesn’t know this yet and so when he returns home, he submits to melancholy around his Father (Dylan McDermott), Mother (Kate Walsh), and sister Candace (Nina Dobrev).

But the film does not linger on Charlie’s isolation for long, instead exploring a sudden relationship with Patrick and Sam (Emma Watson), two seniors who don’t seem troubled by Charlie’s freshman status or his odd quiet demeanor. They embrace him as if it were destiny and so the film takes on a very different tone suggesting a distinct message.  Rather than focus on the many, many things that detach Charlie from the world, the film emphasizes Charlie’s attempt to re-attach himself, to connect to others and to manage the emotions that have ruled him.

In this sense, Chbosky does a great job of using imagery and referents to describe this connection.  The ubiquitous mix tape serves as an intricate symbol of emotions that cannot be explained but instead must be experienced; each song serves to draw us closer to understanding those things we cannot explain, those moments where our minds seem to detach from reality.  And through the eyes of a teen, these moments are invaluable.

As the film progresses, there is significant growth as well as calamity.  Charlie is introduced to other friends like sweet, crazy Mary Elizabeth (Mae Whitman), Alice, and stoner Bob (Adam Hagenbuch). It is with these young men and women, these friends that Charlie begins to experience that much needed belonging, that sense that he is a part of something and that he can “participate” in the world, a feat previously though impossible.  He learns about drugs, drinking, kissing, homosexuality (Patrick is secretly dating the quarterback of the football team Brad (Johnny Simmons)), a tragic relationship, and even the infamous Rocky Horror Picture Show.

At the same time, Charlie experiences the world through the stories that others have written, reading an ever growing library of classic novels ranging from To Kill A Mockingbird, Walden, and Catcher in the Rye. And so the film tries to tell the story of connection, that inherent need for humans to feel a part of something greater, to experience an elevated truth.

It further attempts to describe this essential association by illustrating its absence through a tragic breakdown, a complete disassociation with reality that interweaves feelings of guilt, remorse, abuse and inexplicable damage.

Ultimately, the film misses opportunities.  While the intent is clear and there are some very clever techniques as well as generally strong storytelling to lay the foundation for the central message, the film doesn’t quite make the necessary links.

Instead of creating an empathetic relationship with the audience, the story is bogged down with details that forge loose sympathetic responses from observers: Charlie is sick, Charlie is strange, Charlie has residual trauma.  Chbosky makes it too easy for us to explain this person and his views away by blaming experiences that we likely do not share.  Rather than connect us to him, we feel bad for him.

Chbosky’s attempt to overcome this through the use of music and mixed tapes is a double-edged cinematic sword.  On the one hand, the metaphor helps viewers conceive of its impact and its emotional resonance; but on the other, Chbosky strangely feels the need to “talk” about music rather than “show” us.

Naturally, this is a film not an album, but there is surprisingly little impact delivered through the score and most of the songs are referenced but never heard (if licensing is an issue here, write a song or something). Rather than deliver that impact, Chobosky seems to be teaching a class on emotion and wants everyone to go and do homework and experience it for themselves, a surprising resignation of all auteurial responsibility.

Further, we also have a sort of odd melodrama as the characters ride in the car desperately longing for “that song” or proclaiming “we are infinite.”  What is this?  While the sentiment is clear, there is a necessary insistence on audience thought where Chbosky assumes by using the expression everyone will magically manifest profound epiphany, basking in its warm glow.

Frankly, the phrase comes dangerously close to pseudo-intellectual rather than profound.  It should be noted that even the book is somewhat limited in this regard; thus, rather than a simple failure of filmmaking, the concept may actually need more work (although, the book does explore this in more efficacious depth).

Fortunately, the performances manage to overcome some of these problems; through strong, sound delivery, the actors themselves prove interesting, nuanced and likable enough to have observers give them the benefit of the doubt.  Lerman, as the star, had to overcome his striking good looks to make us believe that he could ever “go unnoticed” anywhere.  But his understated charm, his deliberate expressions, his exasperation and his stunning control of some devastatingly emotional scenes makes his character real, believable, and memorable.

Watson, Miller and Whitman round out the friends audiences are likely to recall.  Watson delivers a sensible, complex performance as Sam, giving us a clear vision of who she is when even the character doesn’t seem to know.   Miller is wonderful, slithering languidly into his role as the confident yet vulnerable Patrick, struggling to survive in a sea of uncertainty.  Whitman for her part is devastatingly wonderful; she comes off as the frantic nut job she is meant to be, providing both vulnerability and authority, often in the same expression.

In the end, it should be noted that making sense of teen angst is an oft attempted, infrequently conquered endeavor.  While there are some shortcomings, some more painful than others, Chbosky does manage to deliver a powerful and memorable film.

The criticisms levied against his story should be taken as notes for future filmmakers who wish to accomplish this task, rather than cruel attempts to devastate his work.  Chbosky gives us a very good film that might have been great.  But for today, perfect might be the enemy of good, and when making sense of the world through the eyes of a troubled boy, that picture may be all we can hope for.

Rating: 7 – A refreshing Champagne that a cute bartender comp’d you!

The Campaign: This Is What Happens When Comedy Goes Wrong…Very Wrong!

It was a gamble. But Director Jay Roach (Meet the Parents, Game Change), Will Ferrell, and Zach Galifianakis are well known for risks in film and in particular for comedy. Roach directed Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery and Meet The Parents but also delivered Austin Powers: Goldmember <shudder!>.  Ferrell has The Other Guys and Old School but also Land of the Lost or Step Brothers. And Galifianakis has The Hangover and then, well The Hangover 2 or even Due Date.

They should be respected as risk takers and when they hit, they hit big.  Sadly, when they fail, like a nuclear bomb, the results are apocalyptic.  The Campaign is just such a catastrophe.

Premise: Two CEOs seize an opportunity to oust a long-term congressman in an effort to gain influence over their North Carolina district by supporting a rival candidate. Result: A bumbling tale with a strong premise that misfires completely, feeling more like an experiment gone wrong.

The premise of The Campaign rests on an intended satire of the American political process.  Roach, apparently not content with the critical success of his Sarah Palin exposé, Game Change, teamed with writers Chris Henchy and Shawn Harwell to produce one of the bigger comedic misfires of the year.  It pits incumbent US Representative Cam Brady (Ferrell) – an adulterous, corrupt politician- against one of the more bizarre people known to man: Marty Huggins (Galifianakis).

Huggins -who runs the Hammond (the town they live in) Tourism office despite the relatively low interest anyone actually has in Hammond- is asked to run by his father, Raymond Huggins (Brian Cox) on behalf of the Motch Brothers – Glenn (John Lithgow) and Wade (Dan Aykroyd).  Seeing that Brady is vulnerable after a scandal that uncovered his infidelity (and an equally mortifying defense from the Representative), The Motch Brothers call on Huggins to defeat Brady, and thus help them with their plan to further exploit workers on US soil.

The film follows this campaign from the onset where Huggins is completely outmatched by the cruel and calculated Brady to Huggins’ upswing with support from campaign manager Tim Wattley (Dylan McDermott), a ruthless villain sent by the Motch machine.  Here, Roach chooses the lazy way out on several plot points: on the one hand a few are tepid jokes, like the rhetoric both parties use bordering on pointless nonsense to choices that look like they came out of Joan Rivers’ filing cabinet circa 1967: there is a door sequence woven throughout the film that is hardly amusing and painfully dated…..it seems more like something the writers stole from a “Gilligan’s Island” episode than anything worthy of modern comedy.

But then, things get painfully worse: every joke goes too far, three or far lines beyond tolerable, even beyond agonized cringes (for example, the Huggins children telling their sins reads like a laundry list of “Yo Momma” jokes). Scene after scene goes sour, like a wayward rotten lime festering behind a refrigerator forcing average observers to stare blankly off into space, likely in shock at the gruesome comedy pile up they are witnessing.

There is an aura of being somehow out of touch, as if their brand of comedy has had a sudden meltdown and the team is simply pursuing certain jokes for their own sake, to be shocking or outlandish.  This worked for Ferrell quite well in The Other Guys, where strange comments were comedic gold; here they fall flat without even a silver lining.

Ultimately, the difference is context: The Other Guys had jokes that fit the plot and the story seamlessly and created a positive shock that comes from clever, witty jokes; here it seemed like the scenes were being created simply to deliver laughs that never materialized.  This not only made the gags feel artificial, but they weren’t even funny, a cinematic combination as cataclysmic as Air Force One crashing into a playground full of disabled, orphaned school children.

Truthfully, some jokes hit their mark (like lightening or the lottery, it had to happen sometime): Mrs. Yao (Karen Maruyama) and her accents, a few moments with Wattley that were priceless, and relatively few moments where Farrell and Galifianakis actually made sense on screen (including scenes involving punching a baby and a “famous” cute  puppy.   And of course, there were several adorable shots of cute dogs, always a go-to tactic when nothing else on screen merits attention.

Ironically, the acting in the film was not a detractor – in fact, one can only imagine what type of endless apocalypse may have been delivered if it had been. Farrell and Galifianakis seemed to hit the intended characters, even if no one can figure out why they were aiming for them in the first place: Brady seems like a recycled mixture of Chazz Michael Michaels and Ricky Bobby; Huggins was aptly described as the outcome of “Richard Simmons sh#$ing” out a hobbit” but possibly worse. Nevertheless, the two were at least able to deliver the few funny lines they had well and sell the characters, even if they were largely hindered by the script.

Jason Sudeikis as Mitch and McDermott both did well to sell the different campaign manager styles.  Sudeikis was strong as the stalwart friend while McDermott successfully delivered evil incarnate.  Akroyd and Lithgow were both also amusing, although both felt squandered in this film. Cox, for his part managed to feel spot-on throughout as the grumpy father figure.  And the wives – Katherine LaNasa as Rose Brady and Sarah Baker as Mitzi Huggins- both deliver strong performances.

Even the resolution of the film was indigestible, despite its proximity to the credits. Not only are the results fairly preposterous, they feel cheap as if the script succumbed to the weight of its own nonsense and delivered a re-hashed ending that didn’t work in previous iterations.

In the end, The Campaign feels much more like a messy amalgam of crude, discarded B –grade jokes (or often C and D-grade) that are long past their expiration date. While there are a few fun moments and the talent of the cast is enough to keep audiences from spontaneously bursting into flames, not enough is done to save this tragic film from itself.

Rating: 4 – A case of PBR and a “Dear John” letter