The Devil's Double
(Starring Dominic Cooper)
Do you want to see an underrated actor totally dominate a movie? This biopic about the Hussein reign in Iraq boasts a solid performance by handsome Dominic Cooper (who up to this point has played suave but secondary characters in The History Boys, Mamma Mia and An Education).
Cooper portrays two real-life people. One is Latif Yahia, a noble Iraqi who had the misfortune of looking like Uday Hussein. Uday is Saddam's crazed, oldest son. Uday needed a body double, so he forced Yahia to undergo plastic surgery and learn mimicry for public events. Entrenched in Hussein's world, Yahia fought to remain pure amidst kidnapping, rape, torture, drug abuse, and murder.
If you didn't hate the Hussein family before, this film will do it. The script is overloaded with violence, meticulously cataloging all of Uday's deranged and criminal behaviors. In fact, there's more atrocity than plot here.
Yet despite this overkill, Cooper's performance is odd and captivating. Each of his two characters is distinct, even when Yahia is pretending to be Uday. It's impossible to turn away.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
(Starring James Franco, Andy Serkiz, Frieda Pinta, John Lithgow)
Ever wonder how those â┚¬Å”damned dirty apesâ┚¬Â took over the future in the Charlton Heston film? Well, now you can find out. It's a solidly reverential flick. It also has a lot of silly gravitas and some madhouse logic.
Franco acts like a depressed pothead, but supposedly he's a neuroscientist working to cure his dad Lithgow of Alzheimer's. While testing his experiments on primates, Franco transforms a pregnant chimp. (How do these scientists not know the lab animal is pregnant? Do the creatures sneak out of their cages for date night?) The mommy chimp gives birth to Caesar (Serkis), a brilliant beast that learns he's not like his human buddies.
Serkis (Gollum from Lord of the Rings) is a wonderful blue-suit actor; along with the effects, he brings a great energy and sensitivity to Caesar. Perhaps the pathos is simplistic, and the villains are boring. It's Dr. Frankenstein with primatesâ┚¬â€Ânot a bad idea, but this goofy story never rises above monkey business.
30 Minutes or Less
(Starring Jessie Eisenberg, Aziz Ansari, Danny McBride, Nick Swardson, Michael Pena)
Last Friday night, the filmmakers behind the much better Zombieland ordered pizza and banged out a script. Over the weekend, they shot this lazy, unfunny film.
Eisenberg is a pizza delivery boy, a hotshot driver, but otherwise an aimless man-child. McBride wants to kill off his rich dad, so he hires assassin Pena. That's going to cost $100,000, so McBride kidnaps Eisenberg, straps a bomb to his chest, and forces him to rob a bank.
It sounds so much cleverer than it is. Just how do McBride and friend Swardson know how to build an elaborate bomb? They are otherwise idiots. Why can't Eisenberg think of absolutely anything to solve his problem? How does his teacher buddy Ansari just walk out on his students to help Eisenberg?
Plot holes abound. The characters are flat and shallow, and the jokes are dry and lifeless. The actors sleepwalk through this crap and their improv scenes are pointless. It's so cheap, with so many holes, it's like a frozen pizza made with Swiss cheese.
The Help
(Starring Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard, Octavia L. Spencer, Allison Janney)
Kathryn Stockett wrote the best seller The Help. But one senses Stockett also read Florence King, a fellow author who argues that every upscale southern white woman is a crazy bitch. That's the only nasty, sweeping generalization in this tender movie.
The help are black women, nannies and maids for white homes from the end of the Civil War through the battle for Civil Rights.
Emma Stone is one of those crazy, upscale white ladies of the early 60sâ┚¬â€Âshe's fresh back from college and shockingly unmarried. She is also boiling mad that mommy (crazy, cancer-stricken Janney) fired her beloved black nanny. So Stone starts to collect stories from the maids and nannies: woes of being treated as second-class citizens, left poor, abandoning their own children while raising white ones.
Despite the vacuity of their employers, the helpâ┚¬â€ÂDavis (Doubt) and Spencerâ┚¬â€Âshine like freshly polished silver. These actresses envelop what could have been stock characters. Their work alone makes The Help inspiring and heart-wrenching.
