Jersey Boys
Dir. Clint Eastwood
I was lucky enough this past May to see Jersey Boys on Broadway, the 2006 Tony Award-winning musical encapsulating the career of pop icons Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. The show was fantastic, and impressed me not only in its music, set design, and talented cast, but strangely the pacing of the biographical tale was almost the best part, weaving in the major points of the story with music and asides from the members of the group seamlessly, keeping things moving with an upbeat energy. This fun, vibrant stage show seems like it could make for a great movie adaptation in the right hands - but Clint Eastwood is not it. Known mostly for hard-edged Westerns and crime flicks, why the powers-that-be chose Eastwood to direct this is beyond me, and the result is a bland, pointless, limp-dick version of the beloved Broadway production.
What tipped me off that this would be a snooze-fest from the trailer was the actual look of the film. Eastwood brought a very dark and brooding vibe to the movie, not dissimilar to the sepia-toned look of Inside Llewyn Davis. Unfortunately, that aesthetic does not gel whatsoever with this material - essentially danceable pop-rock music - and desperately needed more vibrant colors and quick, snappy editing. The no-name actors were also pretty lackluster, and didn't bring much "star-quality" to their performances (even Christopher Walken in a small role looks like he just came out of a coma). The songs themselves were also heavily ADR'ed (recorded after-the-fact, not live) and just didn't come to life the way they should have.
What makes a great stage-to-screen adaptation is a director that knows how to honor the material while also making it fit for the new medium. Jersey Boys does neither of those things. The whole film felt like a last-minute rush job (including one of the worst instances of green-screen I've ever seen in a major movie), and doesn't take advantage of what film can offer that a stage musical can't. What made Tom Hooper's Les Miserables so amazing were all of his cinematic flourishes, like the powerful close-ups and bigger-than-life set pieces that you simply can't get watching a live show from a fixed perspective in a theater. Jersey Boys is sluggish, the set decoration is dull, there's no inventive camerawork, and it totally failed to capture the fun, colorful spirit of the expertly crafted stage show. Although I love the guy, I think it's time Clint Eastwood threw in the towel - he's old (aged 84) and just doesn't have another Unforgiven in him.
Rating: D
The Signal
Dir. William Eubank
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Indie director William Eubank said that the inspiration for his latest sci-fi flick The Signal came from The Twilight Zone; he wanted to re-capture that uneasy feeling that Rod Serling so expertly pulled off in his seminal 1950-60's show. While The Signal definitely has a strange vibe, what it doesn't borrow from The Twilight Zone is a solidly constructed script. The film jumps around in both its plot and the very genre it's working in. Starting off as a sort of "road movie," two friends from MIT, Nic Eastman (Brenton Thwaites), who supports himself on crutches, and Jonah Breck (Beau Knapp), are driving Nic's girlfriend Haley (Olivia Cooke) to California, when they intercept a signal from a mysterious hacker called Nomad and track him down in Nevada. From there it turns into a found-footage horror film for a while, and then it turns into more or less a straight sci-fi story (more specifically a "no answers" 2001-wannabe sci-fi story), when Nic is placed in a white-walled containment area with mysterious scientists (led by Laurence Fishbourne) who regularly make him perform simple cognitive experiments, purposely being vague about what happened to him.
I think The Signal is more like a well-put together demo reel than an actual movie. The plot, though initially intriguing, never ends up making sense, but this bizarre collection of scenes does feature some amazing shots and cinematography, and to me proves that Eubank could have an amazing career in genre films given the right screenplay. The entire movie from the very beginning seemed to be building up to a "holy cow" twist at the end, but it never went to a place I didn't predict, and none of the plotlines seemed resolved by the end. Again, maybe it's another one of those movies that other people "get" while I don't, but unlike a similarly challenging sci-fi picture this year, Under the Skin, I don't believe The Signal has any sort of powerful undercurrent, it's just a great looking movie that doesn't earn the tension it's building because too much is left unanswered. While specific scenes and moments showed some promise, The Signal never came to a satisfying whole.
Rating: C
The Rover
Dir. David Michôd
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Aussie director David Michôd made a splash when his film Animal Kingdom was released to wide critical acclaim; since then his "hot commodity" status in Hollywood rose and he certainly could have chosen a bigger project, but he decidedly went again for the indie route with The Rover, a story about a guy - Guy Pearce - who will stop at nothing to get his car back. A gang of bandits took his ride, and using the help of the abandoned brother of said bandits (a Southern-twanged, slack-jawed Robert Pattinson), tracks them down over the now "collapsed" Australian outback (it's only hinted that this is a post-apocalyptic world). The film is extremely slow-paced and requires more patience than I had while watching it; although the film does sport a great performance from Pearce, whose face alone adds a tremendous amount to the film, I found this movie to be as vacant as the setting it's placed in.
As the title suggests, the entire film is spent with this man, who we learn little about, walking around aimlessly, getting drunk, and showing flashes of violence towards everyone (even a little old lady crocheting). The entire film felt aimless and "roving," as if none of the strange collection of "backwoods" characters in the film had any sort of meaning to their lives. I think what Michôd was going after was exactly that; to show what the "collapse" of society would do to civilization, but so much of the run time is spent just walking around with only Guy Pearce's intense face to read into that I couldn't help but feel my eyelids grow heavy. Though The Rover employs some interesting ideas, my patience has its limits.
Rating: C-
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