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Sibling Felony: LOGAN LUCKY & GOOD TIME

18 Friday Aug 2017

Posted by cinepam in Reviews

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Adam Driver, Benny Safdie, Channing Tatum, Daniel Craig, Good Time, Josh Safdie, Logan Lucky, Robert Pattinson, Steven Soderbergh

Sibling Felony

How funny to have two films out at the exact same moment in which siblings—mainly brothers—resort to committing felonies as a career choice. Not that the two have much in common beyond that. Steven Soderbergh’s “comeback” after his insistence that he was retiring from feature filmmaking, Logan Lucky, is a joyful, rural romp as Channing Tatum’s Jimmy Logan masterminds the takedown of the Charlotte Motor Speedway during a NASCAR race and enlists his brother and sister (among others) into the scheme. Benny and Josh Safdie’s Good Time is a gritty urban crime drama in which Robert Pattinson’s Connie Nikas masterminds a Queens bank robbery—although it is quickly apparent Connie is no master nor does he have much of a mind. Each in its own, very different way is a completely captivating, tremendous achievement. Each stands to get lost in the late summer box-office doldrums. Which would be a tragedy.

And Introducing Daniel Craig as Joe Bang

The credit reads like a joke. After all, movie fans know Craig. Who doesn’t know James Bond? But, then, that’s the point. With his hair bleached white and sporting Strother Martin’s accent, Joe Bang is a Daniel Craig we’ve never seen before, a Southern reprobate who seems to have stepped right out of the 1967 classic convict drama Cool Hand Luke (the hardboiled eggs in the scene in which Joe Bang is introduced is no coincidence). Recruited for the job Jimmy has in mind while he is serving a prison sentence, the explosive expert looks askance at Jimmy, “I am in-car-ser-ray-ted.” To hear Craig draw out those syllables is worth the price of a movie ticket alone. This is an actor having fun playing a guy who no doubt prefers moonshine to martinis.

In fact, the entire cast seems to be having a blast—save for poor Katie Holmes, saddled with playing Jimmy humorless ex-wife Bobbie Jo. But then Bobbie Jo doesn’t have a lot to do, whereas most of the rest of the cast gets to enjoy taking part in the Rube Goldbergian plot machinations as Jimmy, a one-time West Virginia coal miner and frustrated at not being able to provide for his young beauty pageant-crazy daughter Sadie (Farah Mackenzie), hits on the idea of robbing the racetrack. His one-armed war vet brother, bartender Clyde (Adam Driver), is dubious—the Logans are noted for their terrible luck. But his ebullient hairdresser sister Melly (Riley Keough) is all for it. And once Jimmy agrees to bring Joe Bang’s idiot brothers Fish (Jack Quaid) and Sam (Brian Gleeson) into the operation, Joe’s down with it, too.

Logan Lucky seems to have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1956 noir The Killing, in which Sterling Hayden’s Johnny Clay similarly plans a racetrack robbery, but the similarities end there. For one thing, there is not even a hint of noir in the script credited to Rebecca Blunt—apparently a pseudonym for perhaps Soderbergh himself or his wife Jules Asner or maybe someone else entirely. The tone is light and breezy. For another, the details of the heist are far more complicated with a lot of moving parts and ancillary characters, such as Dwight Yoakam’s prison warden, who have no idea that they are playing a part in Jimmy’s grandiose scheme.

It is all a blast to watch. At the same time, for all the complex mechanics of the plot, the characters are not forgotten. Jimmy, in particular, is sharply etched, introduced describing to Sadie how the John Denver song “Take Me Home, Country Roads” came to be written. The song is his mantra, the daughter keeps him tethered. He has no prospects in his home state, but he can’t leave. His motivation in turning to a life of crime couldn’t be clearer. Tatum, looking a good deal heavier and far less fit than he did in his previous Soderbergh collaborations as Magic Mike, is pitch perfect as a good ol’ boy with a brain and an eye for the main chance. And he is surrounded by one heck of an ensemble. Every single one of the actors, even those in the tiniest of roles, delivers a knockout performance.

Really, Connie, You’ve Never Heard of Dye Packs?

After attaining superstardom as the dreamy vampire Edward in the Twilight movie, Robert Pattinson continues to reinvent himself as a character actor. To such films as David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis where he played a psychopathic, master-of-the-universe businessman and James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, in which he played a 20th-century explorer, he adds Good Time’s fast-talking, thickheaded Connie Nikas. This is Jimmy Logan’s opposite, a guy who doesn’t think things throughs. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have insisted that his mentally disabled brother Nick (Benny Safdie) accompany him to something as high risk as a bank robbery. Oh, and he would’ve done a little bit of research into banks and their theft deterrence methods. Really, Connie, you’ve never heard of dye packs?

The robbery portion of Good Time only takes a few minutes of screen time. Heavily disguised, the siblings might’ve stood the chance of getting away the robbery if only Connie had done a little bit of due diligence and considered contingencies. Poor Nick is the one who gets pinched, leaving Connie to figure out some way to get his brother out of the joint. He doesn’t have enough money for bail. But he does have an inflated ego, a mistaken belief in his own competence, and a half-baked plan to spring his sibling that eventually involves him with a naïve teenager (Taliah Webster) and Ray (Buddy Duress, who made his acting debut in the Safdie brothers’ 2015 junkie drama Heaven Knows What), a parolee who introduces Connie to a cache of liquid LSD they can sell. As with the bank robbery, the question looms, “What could possibly go wrong?” That is followed by the same answer, “Connie.”

Pattinson is brilliant playing a guy who is not even half as smart as he thinks he is. This is an actor without vanity, delivering the goods as a guy not quite bright enough to get out of his own way. Working with the Safdies was a wise choice. The brothers with their very specific take on their native New York and the hardscrabble characters that populate their films are building an independent cinema that can stand with the best of those gritty urban thrillers of the 1970s. It is easy to imagine Good Time on a double bill with something like Across 110th Street, The French Connection, or Mean Streets. Or better yet, Dog Day Afternoon. And not just because both movies are about bank robberies. No, it’s just that Dog Day Afternoon’s Sonny Wortzik and Good Time’s Connie Nikas are brothers from another mother, and unforgettable characters in indelible movies. –Pam Grady

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Alienating Cowboys

29 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by cinepam in Reviews

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Adam Beach, Cowboys & Aliens, Daniel Craig, Dead Man, Harrison Ford, Henry Gregson-Williams, Jon Favreau, Keith Carradine, Matthew Libatique, Paul Dano, Sam Rockwell, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., Tremors, Walter Brennan, Walton Goggins, Wild Wild West, Zachariah

When did Harrison Ford – the once and always Han Solo and Indiana Jones – morph into Walter Brennan? True, he never takes out his teeth in Cowboys & Aliens and he never once says, “Dagnabit!” But his cranky cattle baron Woodrow Dolarhyde is not only cut from the same old coot cloth of many of Brennan’s characters, he also could be a cousin of Brennan’s My Darling Clementine villain Old Man Clanton – that is until the third act when Dolarhyde turns warmer and fuzzier. An actor who needs to be liked is a terrible thing.

In casting, at least, Cowboys & Aliens, feels very traditional. Daniel Craig makes a nice substitute for Steve McQueen. Sam Rockwell is a serviceable Jimmy Stewart type. One can easily imagine Justified‘s Walton Goggins, here seen in the supporting role of sniveling black hat Hunt, making a career out of similar parts back in the day when oaters were a cinematic staple. Cowboys & Aliens‘ Sheriff John Taggart Keith Carradine has toiled in Westerns off and on for 40 years, with credits that include guest stints on TV’s Bonanza and high-profile parts in The Long Riders, Wild Bill, and Deadwood. Paul Dano, playing Dolarhyde’s spoiled son Percy, is an inspired choice, with a face that would not be out of place among the collection of 19th -century photos in Wisconsin Death Trip.

It is unfortunate that the fine roster of talent that director  Jon Favreau assembled is in the service of this weak movie, the latest graphic novel to make the transition to screen. The tale of a community’s fight against the gold-mining space aliens that are bent on laying waste to humanity is neither offbeat nor witty enough, at least in comparison to, say, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. and its golden orb, the mortally wounded William Blake wandering the wilderness in Dead Man, the homoerotic subtext and weirdly placed rock bands in Zachariah, or just about any episode of the old Wild Wild West TV series. And despite being from an apparently advanced civilization, the aliens seem barely more sentient than the ravenous monster earthworms from Tremors (a movie that Cowboys & Aliens resembles in some aspects, or would if it had a sense of humor).

The movie is replete with Western archetypes. Craig as amnesiac outlaw Jake Lonergan is the antihero whose brains, courage, and propensity for violence make him a natural leader. Rockwell, playing barkeep Doc, is the tenderfoot who rises to the occasion. Adam Beach’s Nat Colorado is the Native American raised among whites who is not entirely at home in either society. Ford and Dano represent the moneyed classes. Goggins’ gang would be the villains in any other movie. There is also a whole American Indian tribe. And while it is to be expected that they are all going to have to set aside their differences to fight their common enemy, the rough edges of conflict and any genuine tension are washed away as Cowboys & Aliens shifts into a kind of ‘Kumbayah” moment. It all begins to feel like one of those kids’ T-ball games where everyone gets a trophy.

Matthew Libatique’s cinematography is gorgeous and Henry Gregson-Williams contributes an appropriately evocative score. Craig is terrific. He really is the heir apparent to McQueen. He’s got the look, the charisma, and the coolness. Rockwell and Goggins also standout among the large ensemble. These are all reasons to see a film that is otherwise a waste, satisfying neither as a Western nor as science fiction. – Pam Grady

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