TRULY GONE TOO SOON - Michael Jackson's visual legacy

‘This Is It’: A Genuine Thriller by Carl Kozlowski


Michael Jackson was the epitome of a human Rorschach test. To his fans, he was a Messiah of entertainment, seemingly able to transcend the mere mortal abilities of nearly anyone in the history of show business. To his detractors, he was an eccentric who was also repeatedly accused of molesting children. To yet others, he was both.

When he died of an apparent drug overdose just shy of his 50th birthday on June 25, while rehearsing for an intense 50-show engagement in London, it seemed that this conundrum would never be solved and that his life and legacy would be forever shadowed. Then word emerged that concert promoter AEG had decided to sell extensive footage it shot of the show’s rehearsals and put it up for bidding war, which Sony Pictures won for $60 million. Debate raged throughout Hollywood and the business world about whether this was an appropriate outcome, or if it reeked of exploitation.

Viewers can now decide for themselves, as the resulting documentary, “Michael Jackson’s This Is It,” comes out today. Packing dozens of hours of rehearsal footage into a 100-minute running time, the film offers both expected and unexpected insights into the creative process of one of the ultimate creative visionaries ever to walk the planet.

On the one hand, audiences expect to see Jackson tearing it up as a dancer and possessing an insanely high-pitched vocal range. But they also might expect him to be a demanding diva, or to be too frail to work due to the massive array of drug addictions that allegedly killed him. Yet time and again, even on the final night of his life, his command of the stage is thrilling to watch and he’s fully friendly and engaging with all those around him.

But there are far more compelling reasons to watch “This Is It” than the mere car-crash curiosity of seeing how obvious his afflictions preyed on Jackson. They lie in the jaw-dropping moments of creative invention and joy to be found in song after song after song in this film, as Jackson supervises and then unveils a super-suped-up 3D version of “Thriller” where he eventually bursts out of the onstage screen and into real-life action on the boards.

There’s a goosebump-inducing, near-acapella rendition of his underrated ballad “Human Nature” that shows the self-proclaimed King of Pop was still in perfect voice, as well. Another segment shows Jackson directing CGI effects wizards on how to turn 10 onstage dancers into an onscreen field of 1000 dancers in military gear for a rousing rendition of his defiant “HIStory” song “They Don’t Care About Us.”


But the biggest showstopper comes with “Smooth Criminal,” in which Jackson and his tour director/choreographer Kenny Ortega insert footage of Jackson jumping and running and sliding down bannisters into a Humphrey Bogart movie. As Bogie pumps a machine-gun full of lead into Jackson while the Gloved One explodes through a window for his getaway, it is impossible to keep from bursting into applause, as the audience of jaded critics did at Los Angeles’ historic Chinese Theater.

Throughout it all, there is only one slight weak spot; when Jackson’s voice-over discusses the planet’s environmental problems in a way that’s simultaneously childlike and heavy-handed. Audiences are subjected to sticky-sweet footage of a young girl running through CGI footage of a rain-forest, surrounded by butterflies as the turgid ballad “Earth Song” plays. Yet, even here, the film is revealing a little-known side of Jackson as a social activist.

Ultimately, director Kenny Ortega, who would have been the live concerts’ choreographer, has done a valuable service to Jackson’s legacy and for all those who are curious about the creative process of pop music’s apparent last great visionary. It was not exploitative to make this film, but rather an absolute necessity, as it strips away the horrid memories of Jackson’s alleged dark side and leaves us with him pointing us all towards the light of joy through sheer entertainment

THE WORLD'S MOST BORING PILOT

Review: ‘Amelia’ Fails to Take Flight by Carl Kozlowski


There are certain mysteries that place a stronghold on the world’s imagination. The existence (or lack thereof) of the Bermuda Triangle, Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and UFOs are primary among these questions, inducing shivers in those who would like to speculate about the possibility of strange life forms on our fair planet.

And then there is a different sort of mystery, one in which we know someone really existed and then suddenly, simply disappeared without a trace. The famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart was one of those people, the first woman to fly across an ocean who went on to attempt being the first woman to fly around the earth when her plane encountered a series of problems and likely – but not definitively – crashed, with her never to be found again.

Earhart’s story has been the subject of numerous books, TV specials and at least one TV miniseries, but she’s never received a big-budget biopic until now. In the new film “Amelia,” two-time Oscar-winner Hilary Swank tries to bring Earhart and her impressive accomplishments to life, but is hamstrung by the fact that the act of flying a plane long-distance – even if one is setting records – has a limited visual excitement.

Combined with a cliched score by Gabriel Yared that veers wildly in tone from epic to tinkling-piano tragedy, and a script by veteran writers Anna Hamilton Phelan (“Gorillas in the Mist”) and Ron Bass (“Rain Man”) that has surprisingly limited narrative drive and dialogue that often sounds like it’s coming out of a “Saturday Night Live” sketch in which people talk in clipped, snappy tones simply because it’s the Roaring Twenties, “Amelia” never achieves liftoff as an entertaining picture.

The film covers the decade between the time she captured the world’s attention for the first female transatlantic flight in 1928 until her attempt to circumnavigate the globe in 1938. The problem is that Swank’s Earhart never undergoes a major dramatic arc or change in her life; she’s tough as nails from start to finish, with only occasional glimpses of vulnerability. Combined with the fact that everyone knows she disappears in the end, there’s really nothing to hold an audience’s attention span. The whole thing plays as one of those movies that’s not necessarily good, but rather good for you.

Swank not only stars but co-executive produced the film, clearly seeing it as yet another iconic tough-gal role to complement her Oscar-winning turns in “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Million Dollar Baby.” But where those films gave her intense performances from Oscar-nominated Chloe Sevigny in “Boys” and Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman in “Baby,” “Amelia” provides her with strangely reserved, almost milquetoast performances from Richard Gere and Ewan McGregor – as her husband, publishing titan George Putnam, and her lover, pilot Gene Vidal, respectively.

In the end, the film marks a disappointingly conventional step back by world-class director Mira Nair from her powerful, compelling identity-driven 2007 film “The Namesake,” in which an Indian-American college student was torn between establishing his own unique American identity and honoring the heritage of his immigrant parents. Earhart never shows the same sense of conflict, but rather crashes and burns in a sea of indifference.

‘Paranormal Activity’ All too Normalby Carl Kozlowski


Humans like to think they know the difference between truth and fiction. But in the modern media age, even as we feel technology has made us more savvy than ever, there’s always a disquieting edge that makes us wonder what’s really the truth and where are we being manipulated. Is Fox News really “fair and balanced” just ‘cause they say so, for instance? Or is Obama really bringing “Hope” back to America just because his colorful posters say so?

Back in 1999, a movie called “The Blair Witch Project” burst into the American pop culture consciousness from seemingly nowhere. It appeared to be (and was marketed to viewers as) a raw documentary film about three student filmmakers and their tragic last days experiencing supernatural forces while lost in the wilderness, but in reality it was a fictional film made for under $30,000 by a team of indie filmmakers and actors and had caused a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival months before.

The resulting hysteria of “was that real or not?” among the average, uninformed horror-film fans drove the film to a massive $150 million gross in the US alone, and inspired dozens of spoof films and cheapo horror films in its wake. But no one’s been able to catch that lightning in a bottle of mass mental manipulation twice – until now.

“Paranormal Activity” uses the same conceit of “found footage” depicting the tragic consequences of supernatural attacks on seemingly normal people. In this case, it follows the events that befall young shacked-up couple Micah (Micah Stone) and Katie (Katie Featherston) after Micah buys a video camera in an attempt to see whether they can catch on video exactly what’s causing awful noises to waft through their apartment and doors to slam viciously while they sleep at night.

Katie is more inclined to believe there’s a supernatural element to things than the skeptical Micah, partly because she reveals that she’s experienced strange behavior before from what seemed like spirits at other times in her life, no matter where she’s moved. Micah starts to believe pretty soon as well, however, especially after he leaves a Ouija board out and notices that it’s very definitely been used for a message from the beyond. Soon, a paranormal expert comes over to check things out and says he definitely thinks there’s trouble brewing.

“Paranormal” uses a string of subtle effects to convey the slow yet steadily growing horror felt by the couple as they experience all manner of noises, slammed doors, shaken chandeliers, flipped-on TVs and eventually the sight of hideous claw marks in some strategically placed powder on the bedroom floor. The lead actors are total unknowns making their feature film debuts, effectively adding to the feeling that this is real rather than a predictable cinematic adventure sure to be survived by a star like George Clooney or Angelina Jolie.

And yet, while first-time writer-director Oren Peli crafts a haunting, desolate look for the film with its frequent use of shadowy night footage, very few moments of the film provide a true scare that makes audience members jump out of their seats or shriek in terror. Having seen it with a crowd of mostly underage teenagers who should have been perfect targets for a truly scary film, I can attest that the loudest freakouts of the film – other than its undeniably disturbing final moments – came when audience members dropped bottles loudly at tense moments, provoking false panic immediately followed by whoops of laughter, and at the film’s conclusion, a chorus of disappointed comments.

That reaction was surprising, because distributor Paramount Pictures is turning “Paranormal” into a box-office juggernaut by using a viral Internet campaign in which a million people had to electronically “demand” the film be released widely before the studio would release it nationally (surprise, the campaign worked). Having seen through the hype after surviving a screening, one can only hope that the “demand” won’t keep growing once word gets out about its almost-nonexistent plotline and simply sporadic scares.

Advance hype in a Los Angeles Times’ article on the film stated that Steven Spielberg himself went crazy for “Paranormal,” finding it so terrifying that he believed his advance screening tape was haunted and that he brought it back to his office the next day wrapped in a plastic trash bag for fear of touching it. If this is what terrifies the legendary director of “Jaws” and writer of “Poltergeist” these days, then perhaps he’s made a few too many family films.

He should have also kept the tape in the trash bag and spared the rest of us our ten dollars.

‘Where the Wild Things Are’: Beautifully Realized By a Visionary Directorby Carl Kozlowski


There are some books that are so beloved and iconic, they’ll probably never be made into films. “Catcher in the Rye,” for one. Or “A Confederacy of Dunces,” for another. And for decades, the children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” seemed to be among those topping that list as well.

Of course, there were a couple of factors that added to the burden of anyone willing to take a swing at “Things.” The book is only 10 sentences long and takes about eight minutes to fully absorb even when one drinks in the stunningly detailed and otherworldly drawings of its creator, Maurice Sendak. So to stretch it into the 90 minutes or more needed for a feature film, filmmakers would have to invent massive amounts of material, creating the risk that their newly added sequences would upset rather than delight the fans who made the book a mega-seller in the first place.


Thankfully, the 46-year wait to bring it to the screen has paid off due to the ingenious collaboration of visionary director Spike Jonze (“Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation”) and writer Dave Eggers, who in his own book “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” showed his own insights into the melancholy side of growing up. Together, in collaboration with director of photography Lance Acord and production designer K.K. Barrett, they’ve brought Sendak’s wildly inventive alternate world to rich life.

As anyone who’s ever taken a couple minutes to look over the book knows, “Wild Things” follows the adventures of a lonely boy named Max who gets a little too rebellious one night and is banished to his room without supper by his mother. While in his room, a wild jungle and sea appear in his imagination and he sets sail for another land far away that’s inhabited by monsters. He becomes their king and lives the high life before realizing he’s lonely, sets sail back to home and finds that home is not so bad after all since he has his hot dinner waiting for his return.

Max embarks on his journey in a more elaborate way in the film, and his trek across the land of the wild things is vastly expanded to incorporate some of the most stunning scenery this planet has to offer (the film was shot in Australia). The film also departs from the book in giving the various monsters names and extensive dialogue with Max, but thanks to a wonderful performance by literal newcomer Max Records in the lead and transfixing vocal characterizations by actors including James Gandolfini and, costumes and large-scale puppetry for the wild things, it almost all works.

A few brief moments drag here and there, and the film adds in some messages about friendship and inclusion. But these thankfully do not come off as forced PC goodness – rather, they are actually a rare modern example of how the children’s classics of decades past used to pull off being both entertaining and influential without being heavy-handed.

Above it all, crashing and soaring in equally stunning measure throughout the film is one of the most unique scores in movie history (I know it sounds hyperbolic, but you seriously won’t find a comparable score anywhere). Co-written and co-produced by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeah and sung by Karen O along with a massive children’s chorus billed as The Kids, it captures perfectly the mix of jubilant madness and occasional sadness that form the happy-sad hallmarks of any childhood.

"COUPLES RETREAT" REVIEW

‘Couples Retreat’ Satisfying if Unspectacular
by Carl Kozlowski


You’ve met couples like this before: longtime marrieds approaching 40 and facing stress from fertility problems, work-aholism, lack of communication or just flat-out losing the spark and giving up hope. In fact, you might have lived through these problems yourself.

But in the new movie “Couples Retreat,” which not only co-stars but is co-written by real-life best friends Vince Vaughn (“Wedding Crashers”) and Jon Favreau (a popular character actor who has also directed “Iron Man”), these average middle-class American problems are given hilarious voice through vivid performances and rapid-fire dialogue. Or, more accurately, the movie shines when it focuses on those aspects of life in the first half of the film, while disappointingly falling off a cliff for much of the unfocused second half. Yet, just like a real-life marriage that lasts, the ups outnumber the downs enough to make this a satisfying if not spectacular night at the movies.

“Couples Retreat” kicks off with uptight couple Jason (Jason Bateman) and Cynthia (Kristin Bell of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”) begging their other friends – workaholic Dave (Vaughn) and his neglected wife Ronnie (Malin Akerman of the underrated remake of “The Heartbreak Kid”), and high school sweethearts-turned-bored middle-agers Joey (Favreau) and Lucy (Kristin Davis of “Sex and the City”), and just-separated Shane (Faizon Love) and his ridiculously young new girlfriend Trudy (scene-stealing Kali Hawk) – to join them on a retreat to the Club Med-style resort of Eden. If they can get a group of four couples together, they can all go half-price – which sounds great to the three seemingly healthy couples, as long as they’re assured they won’t have to go through couples counseling.

And so they arrive in what seems like paradise, and of course, everyone is subjected to counseling from the get-go. It turns out that Eden is no mere resort, but strictly follows a program by Marcel (Jean Reno) that forces couples to get deep with each other in addition to following regimented diet, sleep and yoga regimens. And this unexpected rigor sets the couples off, opening up about unresolved issues each never knew the other had.

With the hilarious team of Vaughn and Favreau firing on all cylinders again after their cult-classic teamings in “Swingers” and “Made,” the early stretches at the resort are filled with hilariously sarcastic dialogue that takes well-placed swipes at the sappy, New Age-y relationship advice dispensed far too often in our culture. Seeing these guys fight for their right to be guys while their wives awaken to the fact they have their own reasons to complain rather than simply accept their husbands’ bad habits and passive neglect makes for a sharp take on modern relationships.

There’s also a gloriously offensive sequence in which the resort’s yoga instructor (the brilliant Carlos Ponce) guides the couples – but especially the ladies – through a series of shockingly inappropriate positions and thrusts that offers some of the funniest film moments of the year. But when Trudy disappears from the married part of the resort, apparently relocating to the singles part of the island to get her freak on with her own age group, the couples all have to come together to sneak her back onto their part of the resort or face early expulsion. Here we’re promised a series of comical misadventures, but instead the film strangely pulls its punches and winds up devolving into a series of pat resolutions.

Following his star turns in a pair of slipshod Christmas comedies (the bizarre “Fred Claus” and the cliched yet funny “Four Christmases”) it’s clear that Vaughn’s trying to steer himself back on course with “Retreat.” Not only did he co-write it with Favreau, but as producer he’s sprinkled the film with his patented fast patter and hired another lifelong friend, former child actor Peter Billingsley (the immortal Ralphie from “A Christmas Story”) as director. Vaughn also has the class to depict his middle-class, middle-aged Middle Americans with respect.

In other words, the success or failure of “Couples Retreat” rests squarely on Vaughn’s shoulders. He’s a steady and reliable purveyor of comedy, but rarely makes a stretch in his acting persona. How much you like the film will largely depend on how much you like your comedy served up: if you like familiar comfort food, you’ll be just fine. But if you want something with a truly fresh flavor, you might be disappointed.

MICHAEL MOORE TAKES AIM AT EVERYONE

‘Capitalism: A Love Story’ Targets Both Right and Left

by Carl Kozlowski


Firing a red-hot cannon blast at both parties and the excesses of America’s capitalist system, filmmaker Michael Moore’s latest documentary “Capitalism: A Love Story” is also his most stylistically and emotionally mature work to date. Launching with a string of film clips that parallel the fall of the Roman Empire to our present societal hot mess, the film serves up big laughs with its harrowing vision of just how far off the rails our present economic crisis has taken the nation.

Moore has made plenty of claims that “Capitalism” is the summation of two full decades of work, harking back to the 1989 release of his seminal “Roger & Me,” and that this film is lobbing bombs at the figures involved. Yet much of the time, the film has a mournful, yearning approach in showing Moore’s desire that America return to the capitalism of the pre-Jimmy Carter years: he shows that the system’s promises worked out splendidly throughout most of the nation’s history, and in particular from the boom years after WWII all the way through Ford before the nation hit Carter’s infamous assessment of “malaise” in the late ‘70s.

He blames Carter’s disastrous turn as president for the emergence of Ronald Reagan as a president who in his eyes was fully bought and paid for by corporate America to sell an aggressively greedy reinvention of capitalism. The allegations he presents in this segment of the film fly past fast and furious, and it appears that Moore is up to the old tricks his critics accuse him of: barraging viewers with so many claims amid other funny or heartbreaking footage that half-truths and heavy-handed interpretations slip by as facts.

Yet this time, Moore takes almost as direct a slap at Barack Obama and the men running his economic policies. In fact, one of the film’s most damning scenes comes when Moore sends one corporate logo after another flying onto the screen, spotlighting the numerous financial investment firms and major corporations that donated millions to Obama’s campaign. His strongest attack comes when he shows that Goldman Sachs – widely criticized as the firm that made off with almost as much malfeasance as individual swindler Bernie Madoff – holds particular sway in the Obama camp.

At another point, a source says that current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is utterly hopeless for the job, and shows that highly questionable figures from the Clinton era, including former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and former Harvard president Larry Summers, are still heavily involved in the policies of today. Yet other strong segments show companies that manage to succeed while treating workers exceptionally well, including a bread factory where even assembly-line workers make $60,000 while the company’s bottom line thrives.

Moore is expressly not asking for socialism or communism, but rather a return to letting genuine morality and concern for others play a major part in corporate decision-making.

However, his use of Catholic priests from his stomping grounds in Michigan and the Bishop of Detroit as stern critics of capitalism who term it as literally immoral is sure to spark extensive religious debate among the faithful.

Mixing tragic tales of foreclosed homeowners from the heartland with his usual pranks such as storming corporate headquarters in search of their executives, much of “Capitalism: A Love Story” treads well-worn ground for Moore. But his crack team of editors are sharper than ever with their hilarious contrasts between new footage and industrial films of the 1950s, and combined with Moore’s attacking both sides of the fence and showing of fascinating long-lost footage of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, make the film well worth seeing and sure to stir discussion no matter what side of the political divide you’re on.

DELUSIONAL DOUBLE AGENT ("THE INFORMANT!" REVIEW)

Delusional double agent


In “The Informant!”, Matt Damon and Steven Soderbergh make corporate intrigue the source of high comedy

By Carl Kozlowski

Mark Whitacre had a boring job as a scientist and executive at Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world's largest food-processing companies. Trapped in small-town Illinois hell with his wife and kids after previously living with them in the capitals of Europe, he still loved to drive fast cars and pursue as much luxury as his rural life could afford, all the while reading Michael Crichton and John Grisham novels that he believed were all too realistic in their depictions of corporate and governmental intrigue and malfeasance.



Stir all those factors together with his insider knowledge that ADM was colluding with overseas food companies in one of the planet's biggest price-fixing schemes ever, and the fact that Whitacre became both one of the FBI's best informants ever may not have seemed all that surprising. But the fact that he also hid a highly unstable tendency to lie or leak information as well also made him one of the feds' most nerve-wracking and unreliable head cases ever – and it's this dichotomy that forms the center of director Steven Soderbergh's head-spinning and comically offbeat take on the ADM scandal, “The Informant!”



Showcasing Matt Damon in a highly amusing turn as Whitacre, the film is an entertaining oddity because it tells the story of Whitacre and the international conspiracies as a comedy, while its source book – investigative reporter Kurt Eichenwald's 2000 book “The Informant” - is dead-serious in tone. In fact, Damon signed on for the role thinking that he was going to be delivering a dramatic performance, only to find later that Soderbergh (“Traffic,” “Erin Brockovich,” “Oceans 11, 12 and 13”) decided to start over from scratch and play off the ironies inherent in Whitacre's double life.



The film's supporting cast is also filled with rich surprises, headed by Joel McHale and Scott Bakula as the two main FBI agents working the case. The real revelations, though, are a string of new-school and traditionalist standup comics - ranging from Tom Papa to Patton Oswalt to Jimmy Brogan - playing a mix of the film's funniest and most serious roles. It's rare to see some of these comics act at all outside of their comedy-club sets, so the casting is odd and yet spot-on as everyone delivers with spot-on peformances.



While the film's script by Scott Z. Burns (“The Bourne Ultimatum”) is only truly hilarious with the occasional throwaway line, the key to its highly amusing nature is the out-of-left-field, kitschy '60s-lounge style score by old-school composer Marvin Hamlisch (“A Chorus Line”). The score's jaunty undertones, mixed with occasional bursts of James Bond-style dramatics, provides the perfect undertone for Whitacre's delusional mindset as he inflates his actually boring wiretapped meetings to the level of CIA-style excitement. In one of the film's funniest lines, he shows a friend his elaborate and supposed-to-be-secret wiretap apparatus and says he's known as “Agent 0014 – because I'm twice as smart as James Bond.”



In reality, however, Whitacre is seen as a doofus by almost all around him. Sometimes he's aware of it, as is the case with the ADM executives whose lack of respect for his hard work pushes him to turn against them in the first place. Yet far too often, he's too clueless for his and the government's own good, creating an often-stunning series of betrayals and problems for everyone involved. The end result historically is that Whitacre was regarded as a national hero by the FBI agents on the case, yet was dirty enough himself in his side deals and lies that he himself wound up with a nine-year prison sentence for fraud – a fact the film glosses over.



With two of Hollywood's most outspoken liberals at the wheel – Soderbergh's most recent prior film was “Che,” an epic four-hour biopic of Communist rebel Che Guevara, while Damon's dream project is to produce a TV miniseries based on radical historian Howard Zinn's “A People's History of the United States” - one might expect “The Informant!” to be an anti-capitalist screed. Yet the film refreshingly refrains from taking an overtly political stand, instead choosing to make what could have been a dry polemic highly entertaining.