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Tag Archives: Oliver Platt

Mini-Review: The 9th Life of Louis Drax (2016)

11 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Aaron Paul, Aiden Longworth, Alexandre Aja, Coma, Drama, Jamie Dornan, Literary adaptation, Mystery, Oliver Platt, Review, Sarah Gadon, Therapy, Thriller

ninth_life_of_louis_drax

D: Alexandre Aja / 108m

Cast: Jamie Dornan, Aiden Longworth, Sarah Gadon, Aaron Paul, Oliver Platt, Molly Parker, Terry Chen, Julian Wadham, Barbara Hershey

Narrated by the title character, The 9th Life of Louis Drax introduces us to a nine year old boy who is always having near-fatal accidents. His ninth involves a cliff-top fall into the sea while on a picnic with his parents, Natalie (Gadon) and Peter (Paul). While Louis (Longworth) is rescued but trapped in a coma, mystery surrounds his father, who is missing, and his mother, who may or may not be telling the truth about what happened. While the police (Parker, Chen) investigate, Louis’s care falls under the remit of pediatric coma specialist Dr Allan Pascal (Dornan). He believes that Louis can recover in time, even though there are no signs to support this, Louis having been diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state.

Over time, Pascal finds himself growing closer to Natalie, while also delving into Louis’s past medical history, including his visits to a psychiatrist, Dr Perez (Platt). It soon becomes clear that there is a mystery surrounding Louis’s accidents, and letters begin appearing that seem to have been written by Louis – which is impossible. Meanwhile, in his coma, Louis is discovering truths about his life that he has been aware of but has suppressed. As the mystery begins to unravel, both Pascal and Louis come to realise that strange forces are at work, and that neither will remain unaffected by them.

9thlife1x

If you know nothing about The 9th Life of Louis Drax before settling down to watch it, then the direction that it takes in telling its story may baffle you or seem inexplicably weird. This will be due to the dreamlike fantasy world that Louis inhabits inside his coma, a place where a gravel-voiced sea creature acts as a guide in allowing Louis to understand his past, and what it means for the present. It’s these scenes which are both fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, though, as Max Minghella’s adaptation of the novel by Liz Jensen uses these scenes to explain – at length – what has been going on, and why. While they are necessary in terms of the plot, their presence does, however, make the movie a more sluggish beast (much like the sea creature itself) than it needs to be.

Indeed, the pacing is a problem throughout, with a rapid compendium of Louis’s previous eight “lives” given a Jeunet-esque run-through, before the movie settles down to tell a (mostly) more conventional story. But it only ever really convinces in terms of the relationship between Louis and Peter, while Pascal’s attraction to Natalie feels very much like a tired, hoary old plot device that’s never going to go anywhere (and despite a last-minute reveal that will either have you groaning or grinning – or both). Likewise, Louis is another of those precocious pre-teens whose grasp of human dynamics and adult language only occurs in the movies. The performances are adequate – Gadon’s Natalie though, looks culpable right from the start – but the movie itself is a pedestrian affair that lacks pace and energy, and struggles to make you care about Louis or the people around him.

Rating: 5/10 – some arresting visuals aside, The 9th Life of Louis Drax is a slow, unengaging movie that tries to present its story as a puzzle-box mystery, but fails to make it anything more than a run-of-the-mill thriller; with Aja seemingly unable to elevate the material to the level it needs to reach to be effective, this has to go down as a missed opportunity, and yet another movie that doesn’t do its source material any justice.

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A Merry Friggin’ Christmas (2014)

08 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Candice Bergen, Christmas, Clark Duke, Comedy, Drama, Dysfunctional family, Joel McHale, Lauren Graham, Oliver Platt, Review, Robin Williams, Santa, Tristram Shapeero

Merry Friggin' Christmas, A

D: Tristram Shapeero / 88m

Cast: Joel McHale, Lauren Graham, Robin Williams, Candice Bergen, Clark Duke, Oliver Platt, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Tim Heidecker, Pierce Gagnon, Bebe Wood, Ryan Lee, Amara Miller, Mark Proksch, Amir Arison

As a child, Boyd Mitchler (McHale) had Christmas, and his belief in Santa, ruined for him by his alcoholic father, Virgil (Williams). As an adult with a family of his own – wife Luann (Graham), daughter Vera (Wood) and son Douglas (Gagnon) – Boyd is determined to make Christmas special for all of them, but especially for Douglas, who still believes in Santa. Boyd figures he can keep Douglas’s belief going for one more Yuletide before that particular layer of innocence is stripped away.

When his brother, Nelson (Duke) calls and says that he has a son, and the christening is on December 24th, and he wants Boyd to be a godfather, it means only one thing: Boyd and his family will need to spend Christmas with Boyd’s parents, including his father who he’s estranged from. Also there will be Boyd’s sister, Shauna (McLendon-Covey), and her family: husband Dave (Heidecker), son Rance (Lee), and daughter Pam (Miller). It isn’t long before Boyd and Virgil are butting heads and letting old animosities interfere with the festive cheer.

With the children all bedded down for the night, and Douglas reassured that Santa will still find him, even though he’s not at home, Boyd discovers that they’ve left Douglas’s presents back at home. Though it’s late, Boyd decides he can make it home, collect the presents, and be back in time for when the children wake up. He sets off, but he doesn’t get far before his car breaks down. Virgil comes to his rescue and together they head for Boyd’s home. Along the way both men begin to understand each other a little better, while back at Virgil’s, Luann and Boyd’s mother, Donna (Bergen), try to come up with some alternative presents in case Boyd doesn’t get back in time.

Merry Friggin' Christmas, A - scene

Of note for being the first of three projects to be released after Robin Williams’ death, A Merry Friggin’ Christmas looks, on paper, to be a sure-fire piece of Yuletide entertainment. It has all the ingredients needed: a dysfunctional family trying to get along, a great ensemble cast, a race against time, pratfalls, verbal insults, two kids you’d cross the road to avoid – even if they were your own, and a seasonal message of goodwill to all men (especially if they’re hobo Santas played by Oliver Platt).

Sadly, what the movie doesn’t have is a focused or funny script, or sharper direction. The script, by first-timer Michael Brown, provides a reasonable enough set up for what follows, but struggles to move things along or keep matters interesting, and loses what little momentum it has pretty quickly. By the time Boyd hits the road, any real drama has been sucked out of the movie, along with most of the humour, and it’s left to McHale, Williams and Duke to provide what little energy it retains. The antipathy between father and son is reduced to their calling each other “Sally”, and aside from one moment of unexpected pathos, is resolved so easily the viewer could be forgiven for wondering how they remained at odds for so long. Likewise the matter of Boyd and Luann’s increasingly celibate marriage, referred to twice but never properly dealt with (and just one of several loose ends the movie never ties up, like Boyd hating his job).

Just as unsatisfactory is the humour, or lack of it. When you have someone of the calibre of Robin Williams in your movie and it’s meant to be a comedy, the worst thing you can do is give him dialogue that he can’t do anything with, and restrict any chances of physical hilarity to zero. All Williams is required to do is snarl off some less than witty insults and comments, and then, later, act wounded and upset. It’s a waste of his talent, but it’s also a measure of the man himself that even though the viewer will realise quickly this is the case, they’ll keep watching in the hope Williams pulls something out of the bag and saves the day (or should that be “seizes the day”?).

The rest of the cast fare just as badly, with McHale looking miserable throughout (but then who wouldn’t be if your character comes across as a jerk for most of the movie?), Graham looking non-plussed, Bergen doing her best to make the material sound better than it is, and Duke doing his lovable schlub routine for what seems like the hundredth time in just this year alone. Platt is almost unrecognisable as a hobo Santa, while the one member of the cast who manages to make something of their role is Proksch, who rescues the movie whenever he’s on screen as a trooper who’s always around when Boyd is speeding.

Such a leaden endeavour isn’t all the fault of the script, though. Making his feature debut, TV veteran Shapeero drops the ball right at the beginning and never manages to retrieve it. Scenes play out with all of their vitality drained out of them, and there’s a noticeable lack of consistency in both the tone and the rhythm of the movie, making it seem disjointed and like a jigsaw puzzle with several of the pieces missing (there’s also the sense that he’s left the cast to interpret their roles without any input from him at all). There are also too many occasions where the camera’s focus is on the wrong person altogether.

Rating: 3/10 – ending up as more of a ho-hum dirge than a ho-ho-ho comedy, A Merry Friggin’ Christmas fails to deliver in almost every department, and should come with a warning that expectations need to be lowered before watching it; slow-going and less than engaging, this is a Christmas movie that doesn’t even provide any snow to add to the effect.

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Mini-Review: Chinese Zodiac (2012)

21 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Action, Adventure, Animals, Bronze heads, Comedy, Jackie Chan, Martial arts, Oliver Platt, Qi Shu, Stolen artefacts, Stunts, Treasure hunting

Chinese Zodiac

Original title: Sap ji sang ciu

D: Jackie Chan / 109m

Cast: Jackie Chan, Xingtong Yao, Qi Shu, Oliver Platt, Fan Liao, Laura Weissbecker, Rosario Amedeo, Qingxiang Wang, Stephen Chang, Sang-woo Kwon, Alaa Safi, Caitlin Dechelle, Ken Lo

JC (Chan) and his team of mercenary treasure hunters are tasked with finding the twelve bronze heads that the animals of the Chinese Zodiac are made up of.  Originally plundered from the Summer Palace, the whereabouts of some of the heads are already known.  JC’s boss, Lawrence Morgan (Platt), wants him to locate and/or steal each one.  JC and his team travel from Hong Kong to France to Australia to Vanuatu in their efforts to find the heads; along the way they’re joined by antiquities expert Coco (Yao) and Parisian heiress Catherine (Weissbecker).  Unaware that Morgan has an ulterior motive for collecting the heads, JC finds each head in turn and then discovers he’s been tricked.  With time against him, JC has to save the last remaining head from being dropped into a live volcano.

kinopoisk.ru

If that last bit sounds a bit over the top, then you’d be right.  But then this is an action comedy devised, written, directed by and starring Jackie Chan, and made first and foremost for a Hong Kong Chinese audience.  Platt’s presence aside, this makes no concessions to international viewers, and is the usual mix of injury-defying stunts, intricate fight sequences, slapstick comedy, desperate mugging, chaste romancing, and has a storyline that barely serves as a hook for the action scenes; there’s even the standard outtakes included in the end credits (as well as a recap of Chan’s career).  If you like this sort of thing you’ll find plenty to keep you engrossed, and to be fair, Chan delivers the action goods even at 58.  With everyone involved clearly having fun, Chinese Zodiac is only interested in giving its audience a good time, and its far-fetched approach merely adds to that fun.  Chan has a steady hand on the tiller, the action is expertly choreographed, shot and edited, and the whole thing has a welcome, Saturday morning matinee feel to it.

Rating: 7/10 – an exhilarating thrill ride of a movie, Chinese Zodiac will attract fans of this type of thing probably more so than newbies; Chan is still an amazing physical performer, though, and thankfully, the positives easily outweigh the negatives.

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Lucky Them (2013)

02 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Disappearance, Documentary, Drama, Ex-boyfriend, Lost love, Megan Griffiths, Music journalist, Musician, Oliver Platt, Review, Road trip, Ryan Eggold, Stax magazine, Thomas Haden Church, Toni Collette

Lucky Them

D: Megan Griffiths / 97m

Cast: Toni Collette, Thomas Haden Church, Oliver Platt, Ryan Eggold, Nina Arianda, Ahna O’Reilly

Ellie Klug (Collette) is a music journalist working for Stax magazine.  Ten years before, her then boyfriend – and well-loved musician – Matthew Smith disappeared; his car was found abandoned and it was assumed he’d committed suicide, though his body was never found.  Ellie has never really recovered from Matthew’s disappearance, and has yet to put it behind her.  Her boss, Giles (Platt), challenges her to write a story about Matthew and how much his music means ten years on.  Ellie is hesitant but grudgingly accepts the assignment, though she’s unsure of just what she’s going to write.  Her friend, Dana (Arianda), asks the all-important question: doesn’t Ellie want to know, once and for all, what happened?

Ellie is still unsure.  While she works out the best way to approach the assignment she meets aspiring musician Lucas (Eggold).  They begin a tentative relationship, but Ellie isn’t sure about about committing to this either.  At a bar she bumps into Charlie (Church), an ex-boyfriend who decides it would be a great idea if he made a documentary about Ellie’s search for Matthew (as he’s just completed a documentary filmmaking course).  They embark on a road trip, visiting places that were important in the early days of Ellie and Matthew’s relationship, including his home.  They also have a lead on Matthew’s whereabouts, footage of a singer in a club who may or may not be the missing musician.  Although the man who says he shot the footage turns out to be a fraud, Ellie comes to believe the footage really is of Matthew.  Meanwhile her relationship with Lucas becomes more serious, and when Charlie announces his engagement to Charlotte (O’Reilly), Ellie and Lucas are happy to go as a couple.

With the story on hold, Ellie attends Charlie’s wedding by herself, Lucas having gone to L.A. for talks with a record company (though he promises he’ll be back in time).  When Lucas fails to turn up, Ellie winds up in bed with one of the other guests.  Lucas discovers them together; to make matters worse she insults Charlie as well.  Ellie hides away in her apartment, ignoring her calls and fixating on the supposed footage of Matthew.  It’s only when Dana shows up to jolt her out of her misery that Ellie realises she may know a way of finding Matthew after all.  She apologises to Charlie and they resume their road trip…

Lucky Them - scene

Lucky Them has several themes woven through its meandering script, though none of them are particularly original.  There’s lost love, perceived betrayal, irreconciled emotions, and they all lead to Ellie’s unwitting withdrawal from Life.  She’s a close approximation of the person she was ten years before, surrounded by reminders of the time she spent with Matthew, and tortured by not knowing why he disappeared (and if she’d only admit it, still in love with him).  Ellie hasn’t moved on from that time, hasn’t found a way to let go of the past.  She takes part in Life at a superficial level and derives no real enjoyment from it; she lacks passion, though it’s instructive that she becomes more expressive when talking about Matthew’s disappearance to a woman in a bar, almost defending him.  She’s also easily led, allowing Giles to dictate the nature of the assignment to her, allowing Lucas to pursue her and almost force their relationship into being, letting Charlie decide about the documentary and cajoling her to reveal more and more about herself during the filming.  Without the people around her, Ellie would be living her life completely in the past.

As Ellie, Collette has a tough time making the character sympathetic.  She’s a walking bundle of apathy and negativity, and while the reasons for her being so are clearly outlined, it doesn’t help draw the viewer in; there’s no point at which you’re hoping that she’ll turn everything around (though obviously she will).  With Ellie being so emotionally constipated, Collette doesn’t quite manage to make her a more interesting character, and settles for a kind of low-key cynicism in order to provide Ellie with a defining trait.  Charlie refers to relationships being unable to last if they can be summed up in a single sentence (e.g. “I was the exotic aesthete to her mid-Western homebody”).  For Ellie, the extrapolation would be, “A woman who refuses to see the good life going on around her”.  With this obstacle established from the beginning, Lucky Them struggles to give the viewer anyone to root for.

That said, it’s a relief that screenwriters Huck Botko and Emily Wachtel have come up with the character of Charlie, a socially awkward, dry-humoured man who doesn’t always appreciate the finer points of social interaction or etiquette.  In Church’s more-than-capable hands, Charlie is the movie’s saving grace, a direct, emotionally distant demi-pedagogue who’s funny throughout and the kind of true friend that Ellie really doesn’t deserve.  Church adopts an almost stentorian way of speaking that makes Charlie sound pompous at first until you realise just how awkward his manner is.  He’s also a bit of a bully, but in a caring, let’s-have-none-of-that-nonsense kind of way.  As the movie progresses, Ellie warms to him, and they bring each other out of their respective shells.  It’s these moments that have the greatest resonance in the movie, and as played by Collette and Church are also the most emotionally rewarding.

With Ellie proving such a poorly drawn character, and with her troubles being entirely self-inflicted, Lucky Them often goes off at a tangent in its efforts to hold its audience’s attention, and the search for Matthew often takes a back seat while Ellie continues to behave selfishly.  The answer to the question, is Matthew alive after all, is resolved in a satisfying manner, but without all the digressions could have been arrived at a lot sooner.  The subplot involving Lucas is both predictable and dull, while Giles is the kind of patrician mentor figure who seems out of place in today’s publishing world.  It’s not surprising then that the movie is directed in unspectacular fashion by Griffiths, and there’s little in the way of visual styling or flair, while the soundtrack is populated by a succession of indie tracks that only occasionally enhance what’s happening on screen (though fans of Rachael Yamagata will enjoy the end credits song she provides).

Rating: 5/10 – a disappointing exploration of how someone copes when the person they love most disappears suddenly without explanation, Lucky Them flounders for most of its running time and rarely convinces; saved (rescued even) by Church’s note-perfect performance, and best approached as a curious mix of emotional apathy and (very) low-key romanticism.

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