Saving Mr Banks
A Spoonful of Genuine Sweetener
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
PG-13 | 125 min

How did Mary Poppins go from page (wait, it was a book???) to screen, Disney style?  ALL YOUR QUESTIONS (mostly) will be answered in the Disney studio approved John Lee Hancock flick Saving Private Mr Banks.  Who Mr Banks?  He’s a character in the book/movie, AND HE NEEDS SAVING!!!!!  Walt (a very Walt Tom Hanks) has his own ideas of what to do with him and the rest of the book, and so does his script writer (Bradley Whitford – who I still hate from his a$$hole days as the enemy in Adventures In Babysitting and Revenge of The Nerds II), and the songwritring Bros les Sherman (a game Jason Schwartzman, and an always lame BJ Novak – why Hollywood, WHY would you cast him in ANYTHING???), but the original author PL Travers (prim and overly proper Emma Thompson, who is no stranger to nanny flicks) aint having none of it – no songs, no cartoons, no Van Dyke, no color red, no nonsense!  Ya see, Poppins and Co are like family to her.  OK, so what about her own family?  We learn all about them and her upbringing, running concurrently with the story of the 20 year struggle to make this Poppins movie happen.  Travers sure loved her dad (Colin Farrell), a banker with a vivid imagination, and a livid love for drinking.  He wasn’t perfect, but he was dad!  And we’ll learn how that related to Poppins, and who Ms Mary P was actually based on!  But the real question is, will the Disney folks (or even limo driver Paul Giamatti) get PL to p(ul)l a smile out of her dourpuss sourpuss face????  Dude, it’s Disney, of course they will, and it will happen to you too!

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Saving Mr Banks is money at a theater near jews

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

American Hustle
Hustle & (Mostly) Blows
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
R | 129 min

American Hustle sorta tells the story of the Abscam FBI sting operation that took place in the late 70s/early 80s. Some of the names (and details) have been changed to protect the imbeciles. Some of it is entertaining, but most of it is like one REALLLLLLLLLLY long run on sentence that keeps on going and going and going.  Director David O Russell and writer Eric Singer swing for Goodfellas-ian heights, but kinda blows it like 2001’s Blow – all 70s scenery, but not much beyond the sniffy, sweaty surface.  But oh, those surfaces…

like…

hey, if you’ve always wanted to see 1/3rd of good-too-shoes Amy Adams‘s boobs (I never wanted to), then this is the boobie/movie for you!

or see Jeremy Renner smile in a movie, for the first time ever!!!

or be depressed watching Bradley Cooper give his all again (this time with curls!!!), and think about how much bullsh!t it was that he didn’t win best actor Oscar last year for the much better Silver Linings Playbook

and then watch his Oscar-winning co-star J-bLaw blah us to death with her blah acting and eyes that bore her and we to tears

or JO to the thought of a mustache ride from Jack Huston!!!

or watch Alessandro Nivola steal the show, in like a grand total of 6 minutes that he’s in the movie

and look, we all LOVE Louis CK and all, but lets face it, he can’t act

THE ARABIC VERSION OF ‘WHITE RABBIT’!!!

but nothing and nobody tops Christian Bale as a combed-over, hairy chested, big gutted Jewish dude, who hides behind those tinted shades OH SOOOOO WELLL.  BALE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Man, CB is such a fcuking great actor.  So much so that I’m starting to think that the Batman movies were a waste of his time.  Anyone can be Batman (I’m sure even Affleck can’t ruin Batman), and since anyone can, we lost the time that Bale coulda been in other movies, like ones were he coulda played some overly intense mother-effer, who’s quietly ready to explode at any given moment.  Bless you Bale.  May you be ready to smolder at any given moment in a zillion movies to come

Verdictgo:  Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Hustle American’t currently at a theater near jews

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

The Past (Le passé)
Divorce, Persian-Parisian Style
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
PG-13 | 130 min

Man, Asghar Farhadi sure LOVES himself some divorces!!  And why not?  His last feature, the well acted, but a tad overrated divorce discourse A Separation [TWS review] took home the Best Foriegn Pic Oscar, so if it aint broke, then why fix it?  Well, this time the divorce fun has been shifted from Iran to France, and once again, the divorce in question kinda serves as a macguffin for something deeper goings on, a mystery that will quietly and laboriously reveal its solution, and it’s worth sticking around to see the how and the why!

Our couple on the way outs is (The Artist‘s) Bérénice Bejo and (a terrific) Ali Mosaffa (with a terrifically horrible hairpiece).  She still lives in the outskirts of Paris, holding down a fort of kids, while he returned to Tehran.  He’s back in town, to finalize the dissolution of their marriage, but there’s other shiz going on, like a new man around - Tahar Rahim, and how their relationship came to be.  This new man has his own old lady, but she’s in a coma, and he’s trying to move on, with raggamuffined son Elyes Aguis in tow.  But how’d this woman get to be in a coma, and isn’t this relationship with a new woman a bit scandolous if the old one’s in a coma and he’s already moving on?  Yes, sez Bejo’s daughter, (a solid) Pauline Burlet, who can’t even stand to be home anymore and deal with it.  But there’s more to it all, and now that old husband Mosaffa’s around, all kinds of things will be talked about and discovered and forced to be dealt with

It’s kinda strange that Farhadi barked up the same thematic tree, but I’m glad he did, cause The Past worked a lot better for me than A Separation did.  Can’t exactly figure out why, but lets just hope he doesn’t try to give divorce another look on his next film.  Maybe he can try something tha’s a little happier, like marriage!

Anywho, I’m betting 5 bux that The Past (Le passé) wins Best Foreign Pic at this year’s Oscars. Why? Cause (my beloveded) Film Forum has premiered the winner (at the end of the year) from the last two Academy Awards – Haneke’s Amour in 2012, and yes, Farhadi’s own A Separation in 2011.  Looking forward to finding out what will win ahead of time, when the FF picks their movie to close out 2014!

Ooops, I owe everyone $5. The movie didn’t even make the cut!!!

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

The Past is present in NY/LA today and elsewhere elsewhen

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Inside Llewyn Davis
That Darn Cat
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
R | 105 min

I don’t get it. I get that this movie’s about an unlucky folk singer named Llewyn Davis, who’s an amazing musician, but can’t catch a break, or even a cold, but beyond that, what’s it all about Coeny Bros? No, seriously, what is this movie about?  Cause to me it’s about NOTHING.  Is it a tribute to some real forgotten folkie named Dave Van Ronk, who had an album called Inside Dave Van Ronk? Apparently so. But what do we learn about him or his faux self? NOT A FCUKING THING. And what do we care about in this movie? Not much. Sure, we sorta want success to come to Llewyn (a superb Oscar Isaac), but the bleak tone sez it aint in the cards, so why should we care?  The only thing we sorta care about is the cat (or cats) Llewyn lets inside his life.  But a movie about caring for cats, that’s well shot, and has a slickly-produced T Bone Burnett soundtrack, and not much else really isn’t much of anything.  You keep thinking that it may turn into something, being from Joel & Ethan, but if anyone else made this movie, people would be totally WTFing this movie instead of BS praising it.  It’s beautiful, but forgettable.  We already forgot about it.  It makes Todd Haynes’ cryptically dreamy I’m Not There look like a fluid dose of reality.  Don’t go Inside.  Go outside and do something else

Verdictgo: Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Llewyn is currently strumming in select theaters

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Out of the Furnace
Men of Steel Town
Official ‘Website’ | Trailers & Mo
R | 116 min

There seems to be some kinda minor-renaissance of gritty American shoot-em-up flicks these days.  It’s like the 70s all over again, cept not really.  With the overload of superhero drivel and toy driven babble dominating theaters, this resurgence is a good thing, and change of pace, even if the results have been a little uneven.  Take last year’s Killing Them Softly – a lil flick trying so hard to be mad hard and mad cool (like Mads Mikkelsen), and make a statement or something, but missed the mark, and bored we to tears.  Then there was the The Place Beyond The Pines, which was too much of a good thing, cramming 3 movies into 1, when it probably should have dumped at least one of them, or just been 9 hours of Ryan Gosling riding bikes.  And now comes Scott Cooper‘s Out of The Furnace, which get high marks for acting, attitude, and appearance, but by the time it wraps up, I kinda was like, um, er, uh, that was it?  What exactly was all that for?

But hey, where else are you gonna see Christian Bale smolder, with beautiful longerish hair, as an older brother’s keeper to misfit troublemaker Casey Affleck (he does his best work when he doesn’t open his mouth), and melt the heart Zoe Saldana, and go hunting with uncle Sam Shepard, and listen to Forest Whitaker try to sound like the dude with half a face on Boardwalk Empire, and see who can be more smiley & gruffy & tuffy betweenith Willem Dafoe or Woody Harrelson??????  WHERE ELSE YOU GONNA SEE THIS???  Even if the hunt and be hunted intensity that fills a majority of the film kinda fizzles out at the end, it’s gritty good enuff for me, and should be gritty good enuff for you too

Lil tidbit – the film takes place in the steel-mill town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, where a 1941 novel of a similar name – Out of This Furnace – also took place.  FURNACE THAT!!!!!!!!!

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Furnace smolders with acting in limited release, and soon at a theater near jews

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…