Review: 'Still Alice' starring Julianne Moore, Kristen Stewart, and Alec Baldwin

No other disease breaks a person down quite like Alzheimer’s. It doesn't destroy the body, but devastates the mind. It causes a person to no longer be themselves. Everything they did; gone. Everything they hope to achieve; gone. Movies about disease tend to focus on the deterioration of the physical form and the impact that has on a person's loved ones, and we've seen those movies done to death and generally following the same emotional beats. So a film like Still Alice, which stars Julianne Moore as a woman afflicted with Alzheimer's, should feel different because the toll the disease takes is different, and yet it's only notable because the lead performance is so good.

Not that it should come as a shock to learn Moore is the best thing about Still Alice; she tends to be the best thing about most of the films she stars in. Other than a competent turn by co-star Kristen Stewart, Moore is really the only thing of note. Certainly co-writers/directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland are more enamored with how she depicts her regressing condition than the impact it has on the people around her. Adapted from Lisa Genova's novel, the film centers on the titular woman, who happens to be a brilliant, highly-intellectual linguistics professor. This is a convenient switch from the novel (in which she's a psychologist), one that will allow her reduced faculties to be especially heartbreaking as she struggles to remember simple words. But that comes later; at first Alice seems to have everything a person could want. Her husband John (Alec Baldwin) is an equally brilliant scientist, while their children are just as set for future greatness. Their son Tom (Hunter Parrish) is a medical student; eldest daughter Anna (Kate Bosworth) is a married lawyer; and Lydia (Stewart) is building an acting career. At first, Alice notices only small things slipping her mind. She forgets her keys, has trouble playing Words with Friends, but when she starts getting lost in the city streets she knows something is wrong. Then there's the diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer's disease.

Designed as a cinematic version of a doctor's office info pamphlet, Still Alice is mostly concerned with informing on the disease rather than telling an effective story. Clunky scenes between Alice, John, and her doctor are information dumps and only move the narrative along in a functional manner, rather than an emotional one. While the screenplay is always honest and well-intentioned, it doesn't stretch too far beyond that. Alice's condition completely rearranges the deck chairs for her family in every way imaginable, but all of the problems it causes are swept away in a scene or two. The disease is hereditary and threatens her children, as well, but we barely see the situation dealt with or hear their concerns. John, who values his career and has just got a prominent new job at the Mayo Clinic, proposes to uproot Alice and move out to Minnesota, a situation rife with dramatic conflict that never materializes. This may be a reflection of Genova's novel that we only see things from Alice's perspective, but the more interesting story is larger than the one we get.  How the family copes with seeing such a vibrant personality snuffed out by degrees is sadly missing.

The filmmakers clearly have empathy for victims of Alzheimer's, but unfortunately Still Alice is so busy being compassionate that it forgets to be anything else.

 Rating: 2.5 out of 5

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Dave Bautista and Gina Carano Join Robert De Niro in 'Bus 657'

One was a professional wrestler who dominated the WWE and tried his hand at MMA. The other was one of MMA's top stars. Dave Bautista and Gina Carano have come pretty far since their days grappling in the ring and squared circle; he's one of the breakout stars in Guardians of the Galaxy while she was recently in Fast & Furious 6. Now they'll get to work with screen legend Robert De Niro in Bus 657, which frankly sounds like the kind of crap we hoped De Niro was done with.

Bautista and Carano, along with Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kate Bosworth, have come aboard the Scott Mann-directed film which "centers on a father (Morgan) without the means to pay for his daughter’s medical treatment. As a last resort, he partners with a greedy co-worker (Bautista) to rob a casino and the two hijack a bus full of hostages and things go awry. De Niro is casino owner Frank "The Pope", Carano is a police officer chasing down the bus, and Bosworth is Frank's estranged daughter. Oi.

There had been rumblings of Bautista returning to the WWE soon but with filming on Bus 657 taking place next month that doesn't seem likely. [Deadline]

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Bryan Cranston Eyes 'The Great Wall'; Anthony Hopkins will 'Go with Me'; John Travolta Puts 'Life on the Line'

 Now that Matt Damon is said to be considering a role in Zhang Yimou's Chinese epic, The Great Wall, the latest to give it a look is Bryan Cranston. The Breaking Bad star and multiple Emmy-winner may join the film which examines the mysterious origins of China's wondrous landmark. Cranson was last seen (for a few minutes, anyway) in Godzilla, and will soon star in a Dalton Trumbo biopic opposite Helen Mirren. [Deadline]

Anthony Hopkins is reteaming with his Kidnapping Freddy Heineken director Daniel Alfredson for another thriller, Go with Me. Greg Jacobs (Magic Mike XXL director) and Joe Gangemi adapted the script from Castle Freeman Jr.'s book about "a young woman who returns to her hometown in the Pacific Northwest only to be harassed by an ex-cop turned crimelord named Blackway. Forsaken by the locals and advised to leave town by the local sheriff, she instead turns to an ex-logger (Hopkins) and his sidekick to help her fight back against her sociopathic stalker."

John Travolta, Kate Bosworth, and Devon Sawa (where's he been?) will star in Life on the Line, an action thriller directed by Saw V's David Hackl.  The disaster drama follows a crew of eccentric electrical grid linemen who do the dangerous high-wire job while trying to hold on to the women they love and survive a massive storm that threatens to rip their lives apart.

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Kristen Stewart, Alec Baldwin, and Kate Bosworth Join 'Still Alice'

While the occasional call for franchise fare will be answered when Snow White and the Huntsman 2 gets moving, Kristen Stewart has been filling her time back on the indie dramatic scene. She's received some positive buzz from Sundance for her performance in Camp X-Ray (review of that here) as a Guantanamo Bay prison guard, and now she's joining the already-cast Julianne Moore in Still Alice.

Alec Baldwin and Kate Bosworth are also coming aboard the film, to be directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland. Moore plays a neuroscience professor who learns she's suffering from early onset Alzheimer's, which causes her to bond with her youngest daughter played by Stewart. No word on Baldwin and Bosworth's roles, but this is a sort of reunion as Baldwin and Moore were love interests on 30 Rock. [TheWrap]

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Review: ‘Big Sur,’ starring Jean-Marc Barr, Josh Lucas, and Kate Bosworth

I’m not sure why the film version of Big Sur exists, and the movie itself—directed by Michael Polish—doesn’t seem to know why, either. This is a meandering adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s most self-questioning work, one that gives us glimpses into the man’s aimlessness and recklessness but not a full sense of it. Everybody frolics in nature a lot and has vaguely philosophical things to say, but an all-encompassing sense of the beat movement, or of Kerouac’s intense jadedness? Big Sur is not it.

The film, which stars Jean-Marc Barr as a slightly pudgy, round-faced Kerouac pushing 40, with noticeable wrinkles and a sense of permanent malcontent, adapts the same-named novel by Kerouac. Three years after the publication of On the Road, which introduced readers to Kerouac as a 20something traveling the country, engaging in spontaneous drinking and drug use and sex, Kerouac was “bored and jaded,” working on Big Sur, a novel about his time spent struggling with his status as “the embodiment of this new generation.” But, as his increased drinking and isolation suggested, Kerouac didn’t really want the notoriety.

Or did he? Kerouac was simultaneously a dreamer and a self-hater, the kind of man who loved nature for a few days but then never wanted to see it again, and this movie pounds that over your head. The result, though, isn’t greater insight, but a sense that Kerouac’s prose really, really doesn’t lend itself to the big screen. Not at all.

The novel itself is a memoir but with fake identities for Kerouac and his friends; the film does away with that and just calls everyone by their real names. There’s Kerouac, friend Neal Cassady (Josh Lucas), Neal’s wife Carol (Radha Mitchell), Neal’s mistress Billie (Kate Bosworth), and other Beat figures like Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Anthony Edwards), Michael McClure (Balthazar Getty), and Lew Welch (Patrick Fischler). They all get together and drink and have sex and talk about writing and read their poetry and critique one another and get sick of each other and stare at nature and then miss each other and then get together and drink and have sex and talk about writing and read their poetry and critique one another and get sick of each other. Literally, this is the entire movie.

It would be different, maybe, if there wasn’t such a disparity between the natural locations Polish films and the actual performances from his actors, but the former is so beautiful and the latter so lackluster that it’s impossible not to notice. Most of the film is set in Lawrence’s cabin in the middle of Big Sur, where Kerouac gets away from it all; those scenes of natural purity—fog rolling through majestic trees, the glowing green of a forest in the afternoon sunlight, waves crashing upon the beach, huge rocks jutting out of the ocean—are entrancing. And Polish uses those best of all in capturing the monotony Kerouac craved but couldn’t commit to; one sequence, when Polish cuts between scenes of the night stars, Kerouac cooking bacon, Kerouac setting out a plate of apple and chocolate for a mouse who lives in the cabin, the ocean, Kerouac typing, then the stars again, then Kerouac walking through the forest, then the ocean again, then typing, then the ocean again, makes real the pattern the writer wanted to create for his life but couldn’t fulfill. It’s effective—but then the movie goes on for another hour.

Barr isn’t necessarily the weakest link here, but Polish’s choice to have him narrate much of the book over the scenes of the film begs the question, “Why make a movie at all if you’re going to lean on the book so heavily?” Lucas isn’t at all the mix of energy and chaos that he should be as Neal Cassady; Mitchell has very little to do; and Bosworth is reduced to going topless, falling for Kerouac, and eventually delivering heavy-handed dialogue like, “You withhold your love” and “You give up so easy to discouragement.” Those things read well, but don’t work as actual lines from actual actors pretending to be actual people.

Ultimately, Big Surdemonstrates the limitations of Kerouac’s text, how personal it is to each reader and how unsatisfactory it feels on the big screen, something we realized with the recent lackluster adaptation of On the Road by director Walter Salles and which is furthered with this film. “I see myself as just doomed,” Barr says as Kerouac, but it’s unfortunate that such a sense of disappointment envelops the whole film, too.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 Guttenbergs

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Review: 'Homefront', Starring Jason Statham and James Franco

James Franco played a creepy drug lord earlier this year in Spring Breakers to great effect. He has a very similar role in Homefront, though a lot of the creepiness is substituted for angry yelling. Sylvester Stallone writes a script that's aimed at cramming as many testosterone-fueled confrontations as possible without giving the film a backbone to hold it up when it falters.


Phil Broker (Jason Statham) is a DEA agent who quits after a drug ring bust doesn't end happily. That's the only reason given for Broker's "retirement" and it doesn't really make sense, but the script's by Sylvester Stallone, so apparently we're supposed to let it slide. 

Broker ends up in a very small town in Louisiana where everyone practically bullies him or his daughter Maddy (newcomer Izabela Vidovic). Honestly, everyone Statham comes across wants to either threaten him or beat him up. So much for small-town hospitality. 

Cassie Bodine (Kate Bosworth) is angry that her son gets taken down by Broker's daughter when the kid bullies her at school for no reason. Pissed off that no one's doing anything about it, she seeks help from her brother Gator (James Franco) to put some fear in Broker. Everything changes when Gator finds out that Broker is ex-DEA and he and his girlfriend Sheryl (Winona Ryder) plan a way to hand Broker over to the drug lord he took down on his last case so that Broker doesn't find out about Gator's own meth-cooking ways. 

The main cast is impressive, but the story is lacking. So why is that actors like Winona Ryder and Kate Bosworth are in this film? These are two talented women cast in a movie that undermines their talents as well as their presence. They're left as side characters who don't do anything for the movie as a whole and we're left sitting there wondering why the hell they're in this movie in the first place. 

Ryder looks great for her age, but her character tries to pass for a girl half her age in attitude and in representation. Bosworth's character is quick-tempered, but there's no real bite to her aggression, and beyond that there's really nowhere left for her character to grow.

Statham plays the usual kick-ass character that he's played in the past, though with a baseball hat on this time around. The main problem with the movie is that no one in it can go up against Statham and legitimately win. Everyone in the film gets their asses handed to them and not once do we fear for Statham's life because we know that he can take the person down. Franco isn't scary enough or physically equal to rise to the occasion. Even the final showdown is pretty anticlimactic. 

As mentioned earlier, Franco's character in Spring Breakers is much more appealing in terms of being the creepy drug dealer he should have probably been in in this film. In fairness, the story is weak and the script doesn't seem to want to give time to expand on the world its created. 

Instead, it jumps from point A to point B methodically and without any real backbone. There are hints to Statham and Rachelle Lefevre's characters becoming romantically involved. There are instances of character depth when Vidovic talks about the pain of missing her mother. In the end though, these things never amount to anything other than minutes of screen time.

While the story does lack and actors are underutilized, the action is fantastic. Director Gary Fleder puts more focus on the hand-to-hand combat instead of blowing things up, and it looks great. It's the only thing that's worth any merit in a film that's full of missed opportunities. And if you're a fan of Statham and Franco, Homefront is a movie best served on DVD. 

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Jack Kerouac Struggles with Fame in Trailer for 'Big Sur'

The Beat Generation film Kill Your Darlings may have garnered most of the attention out of Sundance, mainly due to its young superstar cast, but there was another that explored the famed writers from a different perspective. Big Sur is directed by Michael Polish (The Astronaut Farmer) and based on the cherished novel by Jack Kerouac about the time he spent in relative isolation in Big Sur, CA.

A festival trailer for the film was released at the beginning of the year, and now a new one has been released to perhaps try and gain it U.S. distribution. Jean-Marc Barr stars as Kerouac as he copes with the instant success of On the Road and his newfound celebrity. Escaping to Big Sur, he indulges in alcohol and gets into a complicated relationship with Billy (Kate Bosworth), the mistress of his old friend Neal Cassady (Josh Lucas).

Having caught the film at Sundance (a Snap Judgements review will come soon, I promise), the trailer is considerably more upbeat than the film itself, which is hauntingly surreal as Kerouac seeks to escape the troubles of the outside world. But it's also maddeningly dull and languid at times, despite a terrific lead performance by Barr.

After nearly a year, Big Sur still doesn't have U.S. distribution, so who knows if it will ever see the light of day.

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First Images from Sylvester Stallone's 'Homefront' Starring James Franco and Jason Statham

There's a pretty good chance you may have forgotten about Homefront, but once you hear the hodge podge of big stars and C-listers assembled for this action flick it's going to rocket to the top of your must-see list. First of all, it features a script by none other than Sylvester Stallone (!!!), based on a book by acclaimed crime novelist Chuck Hogan. And because Sly is never too far from any of this homies in The Expendables, Jason Statham is starring joined by the seemingly-random cast of James Franco, Winona Ryder, Kate Bosworth, Frank Grillo, Vincent D'Onofrio, Clancy Brown, and Mischa Barton. Friggin' Mischa Barton.

So is it a train wreck or decent testosterone-fueled B-movie schlock? There's a chance for either, and unfortunately the first batch of images don't tell us much. Directed by Gary Fleder (Kiss the Girls), the film has Statham as a DEA agent whose quite family life is upended when he runs afoul of a violent drug kingpin. Franco gets to add to his growing list of oddly-named thugs by playing Gator, the guy giving Statham's character fits, and hopefully we'll be treated to the surreal sight of watching them come to blows. My money's on Franco, and judging by what Statham had to say to USA Today, he took the villain role in an unexpected direction...

Staham: "He's a great actor and didn't go down the usual path of being a 'scary' villain. He has the ability to bring out the quirkiness and eerie side to this character."

Quirky and eerie Franco? Sign me up. No, this won't be heading straight to a Wal-Mart DVD bin near you, but will actually wind up in theaters on November 27th.

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Sundance Review: 'Black Rock', starring Kate Bosworth and Katie Aselton

Since no successful female genre film can be allowed to flourish without comparison to one of it's male counterparts(Bridesmaids is the female Hangover!), Black Rock will unfortunately be tagged something like the all-girl version of Deliverance. It should be an honor to be mentioned in the same breath with a film of that caliber, but it and Black Rock only share surface similarities. Based on a story by star Katie Aselton and written by her husband Mark Duplass, two indie stalwarts who helped revolutionize the "mumblecore" movement, the note perfect dialogue and commitment to character is what helps separate Black Rock from the pack, even as some of it's more cliche elements drag it back down.

Lou(Lake Bell) and Sarah(Kate Bosworth) are two old friends headed for a camping getaway in one of their favorite childhood spots, an isolated island off the coast of Maine known as Black Rock. When they arrive at the docks, they are met by Abby(Aselton), and it's clear from the start there's some old anger between her and Lou. Sarah lied to them both in order to get them together, and patch up the feud that's been boiling for six years. Using a combination of guilt and deception, Sarah convinces both to stay.

On the island, old emotions quickly bubble to the surface. Lou and Abby nearly come to blows, while Sarah struggles to play peace maker. Thinking they have the place all to themselves, the women relax and try to fix old wounds, but it's not long before they're shocked by the arrival of three hunters. Before you think this will devolve into a bunch of drunken rednecks groping at the hot city chicks, it's played in a totally different way. All three men are soldiers fresh from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there's something just not quite right. Like they need to be mixed into society a bit more slowly. Recognizing that one of the men is the younger brother of a high school friend, Abby makes the fateful decision to invite them to dinner by campfire.

Awkward conversation full of empty pauses are only interrupted by Abby's drunken flirting. Inviting one of the men into the woods for a little action, he gets too aggressive and tries to rape her, but in defending herself Abby accidentally kills him. In response, his friends tie the women up and beat them to a bloody pulp. Hell bent on getting revenge by killing the women in brutal fashion, with one wanting to 'go all Hadji on them', they instead set the women free in order to hunt them down like animals.

While the world "mumblecore" is hated by those associated with it, what the small budget, indie movement specializes in is naturalistic dialogue and forging believable human interactions. Duplass, who wrote the brilliant scripts for movies like Cyrus and The Puffy Chair, puts that skill to perfect use here with the three women. They talk and rib each other in the way only people who know each other's most intimate secrets can. They fight like sisters, and that more often than not means getting a little dirty in the most hurtful ways. Bell, Bosworth, and Aiselton in a surprising dramatic turn(if you've seen her in The League it's an eye opener) are all excellent at capturing how these women evolve under such severe adversity.

Ironically, it's Duplass' characterization of the men that falls short. By making them soldiers, often referred to as heroes in the film, the impression is that they won't be just another silly, over-the-top, screeching bad guy like we always see in these movies. Unfortunately that's exactly what we get, and it blunts some of the film's well earned realism. As the hunters get louder and more clownish, the film soon starts to feel very familiar, and there aren't enough twists to sustain the momentum. Clocking in at roughly 80 minutes, it could have used a bit more to further flesh out the women's fight for survival.

Having never seen Aselton's previous directorial efforts, her unflinching, in your face style was a welcome surprise. In particular she never backs down on the level of violence perpetrated, and a lot of the film's power comes from not knowing just how far things are going to go.

Black Rock is a very good survival thriller, but it could have been great if the secondary characters were treated with the same respect as the central ones.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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