Magic Mike – A little something for the ladies

Channing Tatum – Naked ambition

It’s been a rough couple of years for Steven Soderbergh, and an even harder few for fans of Steven Soderbergh. Once a darling of the American indie scene, his career has slipped since the critical success of Traffic and the financial success of Ocean’s Eleven in the early 2000s. Solaris, The Good German and Che were all minor disasters, while the Ocean’s sequels and The Informant! didn’t live up to promises. Earlier this year he delivered Haywire, perhaps the most misjudged and frankly boring film of his career.

Thankfully Magic Mike is here to save the day. Sort of. Certainly on the fluffier side of the director’s work, it wades in far shallower waters than Sex, Lies, and Videotape. But well crafted and to the point, and with enough man candy to make it a box office smash amongst female and gay male audiences, Magic Mike is probably the director’s most notable film in 10 years. That’s not necessarily saying a lot, but still.

Based on his own experiences as a male stripper, Channing Tatum plays ‘Magic’ Mike, a talented, crowd-pleasing ladies’ club performer with aspirations to “greater things”. While set on his goals, he is far from selfish, and soon takes stripping ingénue Adam (Alex Pettyfer) under his wing. Adam takes on the role of the inexperienced newcomer for the sake of the audience (think Ariadne in Inception), and the film’s focus on his rise and fall is an unfortunate distraction from the central drama. However, it is through their friendship that Mike meets Adam’s sister Brooke (Cody Horn), whose relative resistance to Mike’s charms becomes as big an obsession for him as his entrepreneurial dreams.

Tatum gives it his best as Mike, carrying the character’s internal dilemmas, though never quite finding the right amount of heartbreak when things don’t go his way. But his physical performance is eyebrow-raisingly athletic, with some truly Olympian talent on display during his dance numbers, and not a body double in sight. The rest of the stripper team provide ample back-up, though characterisation-wise they are little more than “the hairy one” and “the one who worries his penis isn’t big enough”, etc.

As the troupe’s leader and owner of the establishment, Dallas, Matthew McConaughey gives another of his recent badboy turns, as sex and money-obsessed as Killer Joe, though sans menace. One of the film’s biggest successes is how it captures Dallas’s ego, not just through McConaughey’s performance, but through his costumes (in training he dresses like a gay aerobics instructor like he’s making it be in style) and even lighting (a Fourth of July performance makes an American flag out of Dallas’s face – he is literally the American dream).

Matthew McConaughey – Killer Abs

There’s very little to dislike in Magic Mike, but there’s not much to love either (unless you love looking at oily men, in which case there’s something). Mike is almost too much of a Mr Nice Guy for there to ever be much concern for him. The business he wishes to set up, selling furniture made from hurricane debris, is problematic too. The film seems to be uncertain as to whether or not his furniture is supposed to be any good (characters in the film seem to differ on it), so the audience gets no clear cues to see Mike as a tortured artist or deluded daydreamer.

The dialogue is for the most part very run of the mill, and the awkward conversations between Mike and Brooke are often just that; awkward. But the script has a flavour for man-banter, and the scenes between Mike and Adam, Dallas and the other strippers crackle at times. Alas, the best line of the film comes at the end of Mike and Adam’s first night of partying – the film never quite reaches that level again.

Shot in sunbathed yellows, Magic Mike is a pretty film about very pretty people. Those pretty people don’t do very much, but the film keeps the attention until it all begins to drag in the final 20 (predictable) minutes, when its bountiful energy runs out.

For the most part it is an entertaining feature. Its major fault is its moralising; for all his talents Mike clearly sees stripping as a lesser profession, and the film seems eager not to judge those who do it, but those who want to it until they’re too old to do it anymore.

The film never quite tackles the issues behind the female gaze; why women want to look at men the way men traditionally look at women. In some ways, the queues outside cinemas to see Magic Mike say more about the matter than the film does itself.

2/5

Killer Joe – A Southern-Fried Thriller

A deal with the devil

Man those Texans have it hard. If they’re not being chased by maniacs wielding chainsaws or cattle guns, they’re being sent to Scotland to buy small towns for oil tycoons. What’s clear from the movies is that Texas takes many different forms; from the barren deserts of Paris, Texas to the grassy keg parties of Dazed & Confused. Only Texans themselves will ever understand the real Texas, so if you’re going to set your movie there, don’t opt for reality – just tell a yarn as big as the state itself.

And this here Killer Joe is one hell of a yarn. Director William Friedkin’s career dipped on and off the radar after massive success in the early ‘70s with The French Connection and The Exorcist, but this is by far his greatest success since those lofty days four decades ago. Friedkin made a hardly noticed return to high-quality drama back in 2007 with the film Bug, which critics championed but audiences eschewed viewing, unimpressed with this demonless psychological horror “from the director of The Exorcist”. But considering that film an artistic success, Friedkin has wisely chosen to work once more with its crafty writer, the playwright Tracy Letts, and the results are a fiendish delight.

The film opens in a rain-sodden trailer park, as trailer trash Chris Smith looks to his trailer trash dad for some money. Soon he lets his dad, Ansel, in on a plan for the whole family to make some quick easy cash; they kill his mother, Ansel’s ex-wife, and give everyone a share of the insurance payout. Ansel’s current wife bullies her way in for a cut. Chris’s sister Dottie, who is meek, disturbed and perhaps simple-minded, is surprisingly eager for the plan to go ahead.

The family was falling apart like a cheap suit

Enter Killer Joe, an assassin for hire with a gift for making deaths look like accidents, who, as a detective in local law enforcement, has a knack for sidetracking investigations into his own handiwork – investigations he is often in charge of. Unable to pay the man upfront, the Smiths have no choice but to offer Joe a retainer before he can get the job done, in this case exclusive access to the beautiful, fragile Dottie. But pimping out his sister doesn’t sit well with Chris, and delays in the plan don’t sit well with his creditors. Soon there’s enough double crossing going on to fill a bucket of fried chicken.

Adapted from Letts’s play, Killer Joe never feels confined or stagey. It uses superbly framed shots of urban landscapes and clever close-ups to create a whole world for its characters, moving scenes that could have been performed on a bare stage to dirty pool halls and abandoned amusement parks. And while almost no character outside of the Smiths and Joe gets much in the way of any lines, this helps add to the film’s sub-realism, enclosing these characters within the seedy world they have created (even the mother, around whose life much of the film pivots, never gets a word in – it’s not her life we care need to care about).

The theatrical dialogue, bursting with Southern slang, is delivered with relish by the ensemble cast. As Chris, Emile Hirsch puts up a strong backbone for the film, playing the feckless dreamer out of depth and out of ideas. Thomas Haden Church gives his best performance since Sideways as his cuckolded father, an emasculated antithesis of the traditional Texan male. Gina Gershon plies her dime store sex appeal in the role of the manipulatrix second wife Sharla. And as Dottie, Juno Temple brings an easily shed innocence and curiosity while also successfully switching her sweet London lilt into a suitable Southern drawl.

He’s so dreamy…

But it is Matthew McConaughey who steals the show as the indecipherable Killer Joe. Part charmer, part animal, McConaughey channels all his romcom handsome into this wolf in poster-boy’s clothing. The result is a career-defining (and likely -mutating) performance, which brings this unscrupulous, despicable but fascinating and somehow extremely likeable character to life.

Fully of clever quirks and details (entering a restaurant Ansel is swift to pick up a half-drunk beer and start swigging), Killer Joe zips along at a strange speed for a film in which altogether little happens. The diabolically black humour that underpins the film will not be to everyone’s taste, culminating as it does in one of the most appalling scenes in recent – and yet it dares you to laugh at the horror. It’s hard to resist. Much like the charms of Killer Joe himself.

4/5

Satan’s Alley – Review

There is a lot to be said for Satan’s Alley, the new ever-so-slightly over-the-top drama starring Kirk Lazarus. Lazarus is by now notorious for his repeated shots at Oscar fame, and this film is, in a pleasant, crowd-pleasing and pretentiously boundary-pushing manner, the sort of film that does well at award ceremonies around the world.

Filmed in a world of shadows pierced by light, this tale of two infatuated priests in medieval Ireland involves itself in showing how the prejudices in our past still haunt the way we see the world today. The film often borders on the erotic, but always steers clear of it, intent on revealing how religious practices can indeed be more pornographic than any sexual encounter.

The film of course is clearly buying into that “homosexual films for straight people” genre that was popularised first by Brokeback Mountain, and the casting highlights it; Lazarus is the blonde and brooding Australian, Tobey Maguire is the innocent-faced Jake Gyllenhaal lookalike (the two will in fact play brothers in Jim Sheridan’s upcoming film Brothers). The duo have a surprising amount of onscreen chemistry, as the older and more world-weary Father O’Malley (Lazarus) takes the younger under his wing and teaches him things that priests aren’t supposed to know. There hasn’t been this much sin in a monastery since The Name of the Rose…

Ok, fine, I’m going to have to stop that there. I am, as many of you will already be aware, reviewing a fake film.

However, there is method to my madness; the above enjoyable diversion was designed to highlight the fact that while some films peak too soon, Tropic Thunder is a film that peaks before it even actually begins.

Tropic Thunder was expected all summer to be a comedy highlight of the year, and it doesn’t quite disappoint. In order to sell to us its would-be mockumentary behind-the-scenes style, it opens with a selection of trailers for fictional films starring Tropic Thunder’s fictional stars. The trailer for Scorcher VI: Global Meltdown presents Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) as a star who, despite the audience having grown up with him, has outlived his own greatest character and now fails to impress. The Fatties: Fart 2 conjures horrific memories Eddie Murphy’s Nutty Professor sequel, and is by far the weakest of the three trailers, presenting Jeff Portnoy as the sort of actor that shouldn’t be given work. The same could be said for his portrayer, Jack Black.

But as I’ve already highlighted it’s Robert Downey Jr’s Kirk Lazarus’s Satan’s Alley that steals the prologue and indeed the whole film, not just for its inspired innuendo but also for tapping into a very real and evident trend in modern melodrama; it’s ok to be gay provided you’re the underdog – audiences can relate to that.

The actual film itself is a sloppier affair than we might have hoped for. It’s never quite expressed what sort of film Tropic Thunder (that is, the film being made in this film) is supposed to be – its diverse cast (including the “5-time Oscar winner” Lazarus, method acting as a black man on and off camera) would seem to imply a large-budget Hollywood action film, rather than the artistic sort of war movie suggested by its writer and British director. For a film that we’re meant to think is meant to be Apocalypse Now, it never quite stops looking like Michael Bay’s Vietnam. The parody is diluted, if not utterly washed away.

Indeed, the revelation that the author, Vietnam vet Four Leaf, is actually a phoney, is meant to make us laugh at the thought of this farce not being true; but then none of the great Vietnam War movies claim to be based on true events. The audience is left at a loss for who to root for.

Anyways, when the film goes over-budget a more reality TV method is attempted, which in turn goes horribly wrong (in an awfully predictable gag – though a blessing since Steve Coogan hasn’t been this dreadful since Marie Antoinette). The actors are left in actual danger in the jungle and have to remain in character. Some genuine hilarity ensues – the infamous sequence in which the word “retard” is used repeatedly to discuss mentally challenged characters winning Oscars owes a lot to its predecessor in Extras (which had Kate Winslet make the same declaration to Ricky Gervais) but deserves credit, particularly for coining the now essential expression “going full retard”.

But there’s a lot that’s not funny. The one smart character, new-comer Kevin Sandusky (played by Jay Baruchel – getting confused yet?), is repeatedly ignored. Jeff Portnoy wants drugs (and does little else for two whole hours). A panda gets killed for the second time in a comedy in a year – ok, admittedly that was pretty funny this time!

As the film wears on its structure turns into the sort of rescue action picture that we were meant to assume this was not; a Missing in Action instead of a Platoon. There are again inspired moments, Lazarus’s “I’m a lead farmer” is perhaps one of the great one-liners of the decade. Speedman’s “I’m a rooster illusion” is the sort of wonderful non-sequitor that made Will Ferrell famous, but which he can no longer pull off.

What might have been a spectacular moment of comedy, Speedman’s adopted ethnic child (because all celebs must have one!) stabbing him in the neck repeatedly, was pointlessly, and one might argue unethically, spoiled in advertising for the film. Some jokes work a lot better unexpected and in context.

And while all of this is happening in the jungle there’s a whole subplot going on in LA. Tom Cruise, wearing prosthetics and a fat suit, plays Les Grossman, a vicious Hollywood executive and producer of the film-within-the-film. It’s an impressive turn for Cruise, who is surprisingly funny and carries of the grotesque excesses of the Hollywood execs and actually makes Grossman the monster we would expect him to be. But he is no doubt not the film’s highlight, as was assumedly anticipated by Stiller (who by the way co-wrote, co-produced and directed this film). The decision to have Grossman continue his hip-hop dancing throughout the film’s closing credits was a disastrous one that left the audience I saw it with cold and silent, uncertain if they were even supposed to laugh, let alone being tempted to.

There is a lot to like in Tropic Thunder, and it is certainly one of the best American comedies since Zoolander. But too many mistakes have been made. For example, Matthew McConaughey’s character, Speedman’s agent, is so entertaining that we might feel cheated we didn’t get to see the respective agents for Lazarus (assumedly a quivering wreck) and Portnoy (which might have given this waste of space something to do other than moan all film long). It holds together in the end, but only just, and largely because of inspired moments such as Satan’s Alley, Simple Jack and Lazarus (channelling Russell Crowe) and Speedman’s breakdown near the finale. Jon Voight deserves special mention for his brief cameo – he just looks so damned disappointed!

Tropic Thunder is a fun and clever action comedy, but it fails to be the one thing it wanted to be most: a satire. And failing that is the greatest sin of all.

3/5