All About Steve is not a rom com even though star Sandra Bullock and male ingenue Bradley Cooper (Steve) were both in huge comedy hits earlier this year. The facts remains that even with a scattered script and uneven tempo All About Steve provides a lot more food for thought than The Hangover or The Proposal. All About Steve basically is a stalker comedy. Bullock tries to date rape Cooper within seconds of their blind date, he flees. She follows often egged on by Thomas Hayden Church, a rascally Cheetos-tanned news anchor who's also Steve's boss. Church sees the perverseness in Bullock's pursuit. Ken Jeong, Kathy Mixon and DJ Qualls get a few good second banana line readings. One sequence set at an Oklahoma hospital concerns news teams covering a three-legged baby and the two camps, non-leg and pro-leg, that have assembled. Another scene set in Galveston suggests that it's the gay capital of the nation. I don't really see what people saw in Proposal and Hangover, and frankly while the joys inherent in the whacked-out All About Steve aren't all above board at least it's so chaotic as to never be confused with a normal comedy. Bullock in particular seems to be channeling a slapstick craziness that adds zest where there was none.
A documentary that brings together three generations of guitarists, It Might Get Loud plays like a cool guitar solo, with a beginning, middle and ending. The spotlight shines on Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin), The Edge (David Evans of U2), and Jack White (White Stripes) showing them in their home studios and then bringing them together to talk and jam at various locales. The straight-faced approach of director David Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) hones in on technique and how sounds are developed and quite successfully steers It Might Get Loud away from merely being a hagiography. Nobody would suggest that The Edge or White are the virtuosos that Page is and rightly so Guggenheim doesn’t try to make such comparisons. What he gives us are fascinating facts about the craft of rocking out on an electric axe. We observe White making an electronic string device out of raw materials. White also had his luthier trick out his classic hollowbody and attach an extendable microphone into the guitar. We learn that Page was a teenage guitar wizard who could read music and worked as a studio musician on songs like “Goldfinger.” A trip to the country mansion where Led Zep recorded the most classic rock imaginable reveals how the sound quality of the front room’s incredibly high ceiling gave the songs depth. The Edge’s various effects devices and racks are shown up close and personal and he takes the filmmakers to the school where he and Bono formed their first band. This is the kind of film that jump-starts your rock-n-roll batteries only with guitar strings instead of cables. It Might Be Loud opens September 4 at the Angelika.
You probably know the kind of teenager the movie World’s Greatest Dad concerns. Totally spoiled, totally rude with no friends except for the friendless. “R-rated films are really made for 13-year olds,” the film’s director Bobcat Goldthwait tells Free Press Houston in a phone interview. He’s not kidding. Goldthwait besides making a name for himself as a stand-up comedian in the ‘80s and directing several comedy television shows has written and directed a handful of feature films that excel in black humor and uncomfortable subjects. Anyone who’s seen Shakes the Clown or Sleeping Dogs Lie will agree his sense of humor is as sharp as it is sardonic. I ask Goldthwait if he considers himself an auteur. “Only in the sense that you’d consider Ed Wood or Bob Clark an auteur,” Goldthwait laughs. World’s Greatest Dad starts off normal enough with a frustrated single father Robin Williams trying to reason with his son, Daryl Sabara (Spy Kids) after he catches him jacking off before school. Rather than have a regular conversation the kid rejects any attempt at advice. When dad buys him an expensive new computer monitor the kid scoffs because he wants a bigger one. Williams comes home one day to find his son has accidentally died while masturbating to internet porn with a tie choking his neck. Despite his grief Williams manages to restage the death making it look like his son hung himself in the closet. “There’s humor in everything, no topic is off limits,” Goldthwait responds to a question as to how far you can push the envelope. Goldthwait and Williams occasionally worked stand-up together before and as their respective careers took off, often billing themselves as Jack Cheese and Marty Fromage. Williams shot to stardom first as Mork of Mork and Mindy and then as a popular movie comedian. Goldthwait followed suit although with a lower profile starting with the second Police Academy movie. “I had someone recently ask me to sign the DVD for the first Police Academy movie and I didn’t have the heart to tell them I’m not actually in that one.” Another ‘80s film that starred Goldthwait was the talking horse laugher Hot To Trot. “I want to do an invisible dog movie,” relates Goldthwait. “A two-dog cast.” The look of World’s Greatest Dad harkens back to ‘70s Disney films (only with a subversive underbelly). When I mention this to Goldthwait he concurs adding that the normalcy of films like Million Dollar Duck and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes were part of his inspiration. While his previous movies were ultra low budget productions having Williams aboard allowed a greater budget for World’s Greatest Dad in the $10-million range. “In other words I didn’t have to hire my crew using Craiglist,” says Goldthwait. World’s Greatest Dad takes everyday family life and turns it on its head. The more Williams tries to make his son out to be literate and sensitive, first by penning a suicide note and then a journal, the more his plans backfire. Williams proves himself in rare form as he grapples with the morality of his actions all the while maintaining his facade of the world’s best father. World’s Greatest Dad opens Houston this Friday.
A tight character driven thriller that revolves around three people Jerichow reunites Yella director and star Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss. The plot resembles the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain except Petzold only takes the characters and situations from the first part of that book. In other words we observe an immigrant husband whose cheating wife and their best friend plot to kill him only Jerichow switches gears when the time for the murder rolls around. Jerichow, a section of Germany bordering the Atlantic, holds interest in part by the way the triangle is framed. There's constant repetition of certain visual motifs, mainly the character's framing when they're verbally berating each other, hugging each other or sitting next to each other in cars. Although this would suggest scenes are pleonastic in fact with each new arrangement so much has occurred emotionally that each person has the added weight of a guilty conscious bearing on their shoulders. Hoss as Laura has married the Turkish Ali (Hilmi Sözer) himself a savvy businessman who uses brute force to keep his underlings in line. When Ali has car trouble the resourceful Thomas (Benno Fürmann) comes to his aid and winds up Ali's right hand man. A unexplained opening sequence shows Thomas being slighted and knocked unconscious in a family squabble. Jerichow, playing exclusively at the Angelika, slowly shifts the viewers expectations throughout. At any given moment you're rooting for a different character to come out on top. The brilliant seaside juxtaposition involving the shore and a nearby cliff are a plus.
