Director: Adam McKay
My second viewing of this Will Ferrell farce, the first one being shortly after its release 12 years ago. Still consistently funny, though a movie that relies on its cast more than any especially clever script.
To quickly recap, Will Ferrell plays Ricky Bobby, a NASCAR driver born with a desire to "drive fast" and eventually gets his shot on the big stage. He quickly rises to the top of the sport, but almost as quickly becomes immensely arrogant, seeing his success on the racetrack as validating his and his family's boorish behavior. Ricky's world is turned upside-down when he is first defeated at the hands of the gay, French Formula One driver Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen), and the subsequent defeat sees his family and best friend abandon him. Ricky then must rediscover his shattered confidence and put his life back together with the help of his loving mother (Jane Lynch) and his estranged and ever-irresponsible father (Gary Cole).
What can one say about Talladega Nights other than it's certainly a "Will Ferrell" movie. Ferrell has always been a guy who can make me laugh with consistency, even if he's never been an intellectual or overly clever comedian. Virtually every memorable role and character has been the same for him - the obliviously over-confident boor. Thing is, he is so freakishly good at playing this buffoonish role in spot-on deadpan, that he's bound to make nearly anyone laugh at least a few times in every movie. Talladega Nights is no different.
What helps this movie rise above lesser Ferrell fare like Get Hard or Daddy's Home is the comedic talent of the supporting cast. Time-tested comedy pros like John C. Reilly, Jane Lynch, and Sacha Baron Cohen unsurprisingly hit their marks well. But even lesser-known comedic quantities like trophy-wife-playing Leslie Bibb do nice work here. But arguably the stand-out minor character is legendary comedic character-actor Gary Cole, who plays Ricky's transient, rebel-without-a-clue father, Reese Bobby. Many will recognize him as the droning boss Lumbergh from the classic Mike Judge movie Office Space, or more recently as the hilariously dry political analyst Kent Davidson on the HBO series Veep. But here, Cole gets to show off a more dynamic aspect of his comedy game, playing the brash, loud-mouthed father who sparks his son's love of driving as well as his supreme arrogance.
It helped that I watched this movie with my wife, who hadn't seen it. Seeing a goofy comedy like this is always more enjoyable with others, even if it's hardly what I would call an essential classic. Within the Will Ferrell comedy canon, though, I have it up with Blades of Glory as one of his two or three best.
Director: James Wan
A step down from the original, though a high-quality version of a mostly by-the-numbers horror flick.
The Conjuring told the based-on-true-events story of a haunting which called on Ed and Lorraine Warren to assist a family with a truly haunted house. After recovering from that harrowing experience, the couple is now asked to help a poor family in London England with strange phenomena in their run-down flat. There, a single mother's children are experiencing moving objects and terrifying visions. Most notably, the youngest girl Madison is seeing and perhaps sometimes being controlled by the spirit of the old man who previously lived in the home.
This sequel was not nearly as satisfying to me as the original. It sticks to the same formula in most ways - use tried-and-true classic haunted house tropes: creaky doors, things jumping out of shadows, eerie sounds and whispers in the night, and so on, and do them well. Director James Wan (who also oversaw the original) is an undisputed expert in this realm, to be sure. The problem is that they lose their effect when one has seen the original movie not long before (I saw it about two years ago). Yes, the jump scares are very effective, but I've always found such a tactic as being ultimately shallow. Fortunately, there are some visual sequences that are more original and nerve-tingling, even before the inevitable jump-scare, such as Lorraine Warren's daydream at home involving "The Nun" (I won't ruin it for those who haven't seen it) and a few others.
I think what stood out to me as being particularly inferior to the original were the non-horror elements. The dialogue was notably bad at times, either from being overly sappy or simply overwrought. While the original movie didn't have stand-out dialogue, it at least wasn't distracting in any way. The sequel, unfortunately, made some missteps by trying to get sentimental or explore more human emotional territory. When highly reliable actors like Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson are having trouble selling the lines, then you know the writing is a bit dubious.
So I obviously did not like The Conjuring 2 as much as the original. Still, it was loads better than the next movie I watched...
Director: Roman Polanski
Disappointing, even though I pretty much knew to keep my expectations tempered.
All I knew about this movie was that it was about a rare book dealer who is sent to track down an ultra-rare volume reputed to be of particularly demonic nature. As a guy who loves books, used to work in book stores and collect books, and enjoys a good Biblical demon story, I thought there would be enough here to really enjoy. Not quite.
The story follows Dean Corso (Johnny Depp), a book dealer of highly dubious morals who is hired to track down a pair of books supposedly written by Satan himself. The man who hires him, Boris Balkan (Frank Lingella), has one copy of the volume and he wants it authenticated along with the other two. Corso infers that Balkan has been attempting to use the books to literally raise the devil and acquire unspeakable power in the process. Corso goes to Europe, where the other two copies are held. As he gets closer to the books and their owners, however, Corso becomes a person of interest for a few mysterious individuals. When people start to die around Corso and the books, things grow ever-more sinister. Everything culminates when Balkan ends up with the relevant information from the three texts and enacts a Satanic ritual, only to fail horribly and burn himself alive. Corso, who witnesses this first-hand, is then granted his own chance to pass through the titular "ninth gate," and into who knows what sort of demonic powers.
The movie has some solid ideas going for it. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what accomplished director Roman Polanski was thinking as he made this movie. I don't know if there was studio interference here, or if it was just a bad misfire in terms of vision (it happens to the best of them), but the movie never seems to get anything completely right. There are several plot turns which at first are intriguing but then fall flat due to either being unimaginative or simply lacking enough detail to be compelling. Characters act in illogical or wildly inconsistent ways. I often had the feeling that Polanski was trying to be too subtle, leaving the audience to figure something out but not giving us nearly enough clues to do so. What we are left with is a mess of overly vague suggestions that never coalesce into a satisfying narrative.
The acting is just as spotty as the narrative. The veterans like Depp, Langella, and even Lena Olin are fine. They do their typically-solid jobs here. But more than a few secondary characters were downright awful, most obviously "The Girl," played by Emmanuelle Seigner. I don't know any of Seigner's other work, but it looks like she has a solid resume in film and TV. That said, it was simply hard to watch her in this movie. I can only guess at the possible reasons; whatever it was, though, it resulted in line deliveries that were alternately stiff and oddly-stressed. There were also a few other bizarrely wooden actors in lesser parts, which rang of Polanski hiring them for their stunning good looks rather than any trace of acting ability.
This movie is a shame, really. It had the makings of something much scarier and memorable, rather than the frustrating mess that it was.
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