L&D Report

L&D took advantage of some Marcus Rewards to see Vice on bargain Tuesday,  and after some minor hiccups with the cashier, we made it in to see an alarming trailer of an upcoming Topher Grace film, Breakthrough.   In good trailer tradition, we now know the plot pretty much exactly, and L&D will likely be able to skip that one altogether.

Of course, we were there to see Vice, writer-director Adam McKay’s portrait of former Secretary of Defense and Vice President, Dick Cheney, and we thought we pretty much knew what was going to happen in this movie, too.  So, really, we were there to see if Christian Bale’s portrayal is all that it’s cracked up to be — it is, he’s brilliant and gets it right, the pause, the sneer.  Bale is not the only big, big star here, with Amy Adams playing Lynne Cheney, Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush, and Steve Carrell as Donald Rumsfeld.   Adams is very good and Carrell starts out really strong and fades a bit, while Rockwell doesn’t really get much to work with beyond something just above an SNL-type portrayal.  Good work if you can get it.

The movie is fine, really, funny in parts — the first end-credits bit was pretty clever — but ultimately it turns into a polemical hit piece on Cheney.  This is somewhat amusing because the film makers were obstinate that this was based on the facts.  Even if that were true, which it probably isn’t, there are many facts that are omitted, on the one hand, and many connections that are somewhere between tenuous and ridiculous.

On the first part, consider the complete omission of the Iraq war under President George H.W. Bush.  It was during that war that Cheney and General Colin Powell emerged as a tandem with real star power.  Here’s the take of Slate’s, Fred Kaplan, who certainly knows plenty about Cheney’s career:

The film …barely mentions the first Gulf War, during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, when Cheney was secretary of defense. This is no small matter: The fact that the elder Bush won that war but left Saddam Hussein in power had an influence on how the younger Bush and Cheney viewed the second Iraq war a decade later.

Another reason for McKay’s brush-off of the first Gulf War may be that dealing it would have forced him to confront the fact that, even by the estimate of his critics (including me), Cheney oversaw that war—and handled his duties as defense secretary broadly—with open-minded professionalism. McKay begins the film by having his narrator say that when Cheney became vice president, nobody knew much about him. In reality, he’d emerged from the Gulf War an admired celebrity. In his many press interviews at the time, he came off as an emblem of cool competence…

This is why so many people who observed Cheney under Bush Sr. (including me) were so stunned and puzzled by his fanatical turn under Bush Jr.  What changed? Had the three heart attacks blocked some of the oxygen to his brain? Was it the sheer scare of Sept. 11? Was it his belief that, in the wake of its Cold War victory and the Soviet Union’s implosion (an important contextual event the film ignores), the United States could get away with a more aggressive foreign policy and, therefore, should? In the film, from the time of his ascent to high power on, he undergoes no change and thus there’s no need to explain it.

That is my emphasis in spots, because I really couldn’t agree more with those quotations.  I lived in DC during the bulk of the first Gulf War, and remember watching the Cheney-Powell show with some legitimate DC insiders.  He was masterful and definitely admired from both sides of the aisle, regardless of what your thoughts on that war were.  That entire Kaplan piece is a pretty good summation of my view on the “facts” in this one.

As far as the second point goes — some of the conclusions the film makers seem to draw about Cheney’s influence — it seems unlikely that Cheney is responsible for political polarization, ISIS, global climate change, the California wildfires, and the rise of Fox News, but I suppose it’s possible.  The expansiveness of the indictments and the black-hat, white-hat nature of the narrative is degrading to those in the audience with cerebral capabilities.

In the end, you might enjoy it no matter your politics.  I talked to someone today who said that their conservative father thought the movie was “satire,” rather than a biopic.  It has its moments.  It certainly has more than it’s share of star firepower.

After battling off illness and a last-minute cancellation last week, L&D finally made it out to see The Mule at the fabulous Marcus $5 Tuesday special.  As we are both on pre-holiday diets, we bypassed our free popcorns and headed straight into a reasonably crowded late showing.

The verdict?  Well, to paraphrase Lloyd Benston, it’s no Gran Torino (HT: L). In the plus column we have some very good and probably memorable performances by Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper, the former in the title role and the latter the FBI agent out to get him.  After that, the movie just isn’t that compelling. If you’ve seen the trailers, you probably have a reasonably good idea how this all unfolds.  The third lead, Ignacio Serricchio as Julio, the handler, doesn’t get his own subplot and consequently doesn’t quite add up. Laurence Fishburne and Diane Wiest are each given one note to play and are uninteresting.  That said, we did like Andy Garcia as the affable cartel head, much better than those meanie thugs that want to replace him, that’s for sure.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot to like.   In addition to the solid lead characters, the production is pretty crisp and the movie has more than its fair share of tension.  Unfortunately, the back stories and supporting casts — Eastwood’s family, Cooper’s family, the Cartel drama — don’t add up to a story that will stay with us.  Indeed, the movie is based on a newspaper article, which isn’t terribly surprising given the strong central story line and the less fleshed out supporting material.  My guess it’s staying power will be about as great in your memory — you’ll remember the headline and a few details, but more as an anecdote than as a thesis.

So, solid fare, over the $5 bar, nice enough, but it’s no Gran Torino.

The opening shot of the opening scene of Rocky (1976) is of a painting of Jesus on the wall of the Church converted to a gymnasium, with Our Savior looking down on a match between a couple of third-rate fighters, Spider Rico and Rocky Balboa.  As writer, director, and now super-duper star, Sylvester Stallone explains it,  “The character of Rocky was built on the idea that he was chosen to do something.  That’s why the first image in Rocky is the picture of Christ.” As it is said in Proverbs:

The eyes of the LORD are in every place, Watching the evil and the good.

If the Lord is lucky, he will not have to see Creed II, an abomination of a movie bringing the Rocky series to its lowest point since Tommy Gunn.   The movie is at once predictable and incoherent, one that sets up some foundational existential questions, and then inexplicably pretends like it didn’t.  Have you ever had a friend ask you a serious question and then talk over you while you are trying to answer it?  That’s pretty much how the tail end of this movie goes.

Okay, so that is probably a little harsher than it needs to be.  And I am sure my allergic reaction at least partly stems from high expectations for the rebirth of the series.  I am a reasonably big fan of the Rocky movies, particularly the original, Rocky III,  Rocky IV (a guilty pleasure), and L&D really liked last year’s Creed, as a flawed but entertaining movie that had a lot of heart.

While Creed II has some heart, what it has a lot more of is the plot lines lifted directly from Rocky III and Rocky IV.  The movie opens with the title character ascending to the  heavyweight championship juxtaposed with the spawn of Ivan Drago beating down challengers in the dingy gyms Moscow has to offer.   The elder Drago is in his son’s corner, and we see an (obviously) American fight promoter gym rat keeping tabs on both sides of the world.

This is essentially the set-up of Rocky III, comfortable champ, hungry challenger. Instead of Mr. T, however, we get the Son of Drago, who lacks the charisma and intrigue of his father, so the film just decides to focus on the elder Drago (Dolph Lundgren).   You may recall from Rocky IV that it was Ivan Drago who killed Apollo Creed in the ring back in the 1980s.  Rocky, of course, “avenged” this tragedy by not only defeating Drago on his home turf in the Soviet Union, but also by winning the heart and minds of the Soviet crowd in spectacular and ridiculous fashion.

Fast forward to Creed II and we learn that the elder Drago has yet to live down the loss. His moneyed countrymen spurn him, and his charismatic wife (Brigitte Nielson) walked away from both Ivan and their son, Viktor.   As Jung famously observed, “the greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents,” and, indeed, it is up to Viktor to make amends for the shortcomings of his father.   Together with the American fight promoter, the Dragos visit Philadelphia to goad the new champion into a match.  That the young Adonis Creed feels  compelled to fight under his late father’s flag puts the basic geopolitical tensions of Rocky IV into play, along with Drago-Balboa, Drago-Creed, Drago-ex-Mrs. Drago, Creed-papa Creed, Creed-mama Creed, Creed-Bianca, Donny-Biancas-baby Creed, to name a few.

Although there is way too much going on and I have many issues with what the movie actually attempts to resolve, I will just mention that my primary objection has to do with the treatment of fighter safety, particularly the question of a corner’s decision to stop a fight.  Because it is bad form for a fighter to “quit” it is often incumbent on the referee or the corner to step in and save the fighter from himself.   Firstly, it is the referee’s responsibility to stop a fight when the fighter is unable to defend himself anymore.  Absent an official stoppage, the fighter’s corner can “throw in the towel” when it believes its fighter has had enough punishment.

This, of course, is a paramount issue because presumably Apollo Creed might have made it out of the ring so many years ago if Rocky or Apollo’s long-time trainer Duke Evers had thrown in the towel on his behalf.  Indeed, we learn that Rocky feels the pain two-fold because he was the champ who should have been fighting Drago, and he also was in the corner that didn’t protect Apollo.  Apollo’s widow (Felicia Rashad) also feels the pain of loss, spending her life amidst Apollo’s fortune and glory, but without the man who made it all possible.  And then, of course, there is young Adonis himself,  feeling the pain of being deprived of a father at the same time that he is about to become a father.

That actually doesn’t sound too bad of a plot, does it?  If they had to go back in time, would they have stopped the fight when their fighter was in danger?

The movie wrestles with this in a perfunctory fashion, but it ultimately throws in the towel when it matters most.  For me, this was both disappointing and stupefying, and, beginning with the tire in the ring during training, I just don’t understand why Stallone let the script follow that path.  If the rifle is hanging on the wall in the opening act, it had better go off by the end of the film — if it doesn’t get fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there!  Is this really what young Adonis Creed was chosen to do?

On the plus side, there are actually a lot of things on the plus side.  Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky continues to be a great and emergent character, and Stallone himself continues to be a modern marvel of HGH.  I half expected him to get in the ring and spar a few rounds himself.  Even better, we have Michael B. Jordan being his great self, though his greatness is limited by the more cartoonish motivations given to him by the script.  He continues on his relationship with Bianca (Tessa Thompson), and her character and her music are both taken seriously.  The principal focus on Adonis and his family continues the rightful transition toward emphasizing African-American characters, as it is, of course, African Americans who continue to dominate the U.S. boxing scene.  Indeed, Jordan and Stallone have a great exchange on this point over baby names.

We also get to see Dolph Lundgren again, and he really has this strong, silent type thing nailed.  He isn’t given much to work with, but he is entirely believable.  I will also say I was pleased that the Brigitte Nielson character is satisfyingly predictable, and she manages to light up the movie without having to say a word.  With those two taking center stage, the young Drago — you know, that big muscly guy that almost gets run over by a Hummer a couple of times — isn’t given anything to work with.  Who is the villain here, anyway?

So while the plot is just too much tried and not enough true, there is probably enough to like here to rally this one above the $6 bar.  It has played to mostly positive reviews and we are undoubtedly headed to Creed III, so if you have seen the first seven in the series, there is probably enough here to warrant seeing the eighth.  The Achilles heel is not that the movie didn’t entertain, but that it could have rivaled the “original” with a bit more imagination and work on the script side.

Next time, I’ll manage my expectations better.  And I hope the Creed III folks will either fire that rifle or keep it out of sight.