• About

Cinezine Kane

Cinezine Kane

Tag Archives: Steve Coogan

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon come to the end of the road in THE TRIP TO GREECE

22 Friday May 2020

Posted by cinepam in Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Michael Winterbottom, Rob Brydon, Steve Coogan, The Trip, The Trip to Greece

It almost seems cruel for Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip to Greece to be coming out now with COVID-19 still wreaking havoc in the world and tourism at a standstill. Like the three previous The Trip movies, this one stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as fictional versions of themselves on a culinary/cultural tour of a corner of Europe. Like the three other films, it is designed to send the viewer scurrying to guidebooks and travel sites to follow in the actors’ footsteps. For now, any plans to turn those dreams into reality are delayed. Visceral adventure is all that is available.

At least, Coogan, Brydon, and their director deliver the goods in what Winterbottom is calling the series’ final installment. This time the premise is that The Observer has once again hired Coogan to write an article, this time sending him to follow the route laid out in Homer’s The Odyssey, beginning in what is now Turkey and traveling through Greece. Brydon’s observes tartly that Odysseus’ journey back to Ithaca in the ancient epic took 10 years, while he and Coogan are devoting only six days to their CliffsNotes’ version of the trek.

However compact the trip, the odd acting couple pack in a lot of incident. If Greece has a bad angle, it is not apparent from this film. Traveling by car and sometimes boat, Coogan and Brydon take in azure seas, verdant countryside, and sleek cities. When they are not indulging in gastronomical delights, they walk in the steps of the ancients. Among the sites the pair visits are Athens’ agora, the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the Caves of Diros, and the Theatre of Epidaurus.

What is surprising about this film as The Trip series reaches its finish line is its tone. Oh, there is still plenty of humor and celebrity impressions – a highlight is Coogan and Brydon offering competing versions of the torture scene between Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man. Coogan remains dedicated to proving his superior intellect, even as Brydon gently chides him with his own displays of knowledge. Coogan is still a heat-seeking missile of all-consuming ambition. Fresh off his BAFTA-nominated success as comedian Stan Laurel in Stan and Ollie, now he has his heart set on a part in La La Land director Damian Chazelle’s latest film. The more family-oriented Brydon continues to be content with his lot in life as a character actor.

But with all that, The Trip to Greece is scarcely a comedy. Coogan is in a different place in his life and the film takes a melancholy turn as he absorbs news from home. The situation transforms his dreams into vivid, surreal nightmares. He is often distracted in his interactions with Brydon. And for all the ways the series has portrayed Coogan as the completely self-involved one, Brydon never asks the reason Coogan is so often on the phone with his son Joe (Timothy Leach).

Some will carp at this turn from humor, but The Trip to Greece is the most resonant of the quartet of films. Lost among all the praise for Coogan and Brydon’s dueling Michael Caines and other impressions is the fact their very performances are impressions – of themselves. At last, Coogan and, to a certain extent, Brydon emerge as deeper, more complex characters and the film is the richer for it. If this really is the end of The Trip‘s road, the series takes its final bow on a satisfying note. Now, if only the rest of us could take our own Greek vacations. –Pam Grady

The Trip to Greece is available in select theaters and all major digital/cable platforms.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

Review: Coogan soars in faltering GREED

06 Friday Mar 2020

Posted by cinepam in Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Greed, Isla Fisher, Michael Winterbottom, Steve Coogan

1Greed plays to Steve Coogan’s strengths. He is an actor able to embody repellent characters but layer them with enough charm that an audience will keep watching and even begrudgingly like even the complete bastards he sometimes plays. And so it is with Greed, Michael Winterbottom’s latest, a misfire in which Coogan soars as billionaire jerk Sir Richard “Greedy” McCreadie even as the film flails around him in a mostly unsuccessful attempt to satirize the super-rich while calling attention to the injustices built into the garment industry.

This is Greedy McCreadie: He’s the type of person spending millions to throw himself a 60th birthday party on the Greek island of Mykonos with a guest list that includes plenty of celebrities to reflect their stardust back at him and an ancient Roman gladiator theme (complete with lion). He’s the kind of guy who upon seeing a group of Greek refugees on the beach has the police remove lest they disturb his guests’ view with their… poverty. He is someone who has built his own wealth partially by dodging taxes in Monaco but mostly by hardball bargaining with the owners of Sri Lankan sweatshops who provide the clothing for his stores. He is a vain man with blinding white teeth, who traded in his wife Samantha (Isla Fisher) for Naomi (Shanina Shaik), a girl young enough to be his daughter. Oh, and he’s such a genius businessman that as revealed through the time-shifting narrative, he has presided over serial bankruptcies of once high-flying fashion chains (gee, that scenario is somehow so familiar).

So far, so much wretched excess. Coogan knocks it out of the park, at once absolutely repulsive yet somehow oddly likeable. Winterbottom chose well in casting Jamie Blackley as Greedy’s younger self, an avaricious brat even at a tender age. Fisher is an apt match for Coogan, playing Samantha as someone who embraces her greed with cheerful amorality. The sun-drenched Mykonos setting perfectly encapsulates the rewards that accrue to those who give no thought to the rest of the world in their full embrace of the greed-is-good ethos. And if a soundtrack that includes The Flying Lizards’ “Money (That’s What I Want)” and ABBA’s “Money Money Money” is sometimes a little on the nose, it is apt.

Greed gets that much right, but it all falls apart in the film’s storytelling. Winterbottom is attempting to satirize the super-rich, but the problem is the lives so breathlessly reported by the tabloids already resemble satire. How do you exaggerate the already exaggerated?

By focusing on Greedy McCreadie Winterbottom is obscuring his own point. He wants to say something about the exploitation of labor by people like Greedy whose negotiations with sweatshop owners drive down his price , but also the conditions and pay under which the people who actually make the clothing he sells work. Even when his party manager Amanda (Dinita Gohil) relates a heartfelt story of a tragedy that rose out of one of Greedy’s deals, it feels at a remove. A drama about garment workers and their travails may not as be as sexy as a quasi-comedy about a larger-than-life lowlife (but nevertheless captivating) billionaire, but to make a story about their exploitation, it really ought to be told through their eyes. Otherwise, the real message of Greed is clear. The world belongs to people like Greedy McCreadie. The rest of us are bit players in their drama. –Pam Grady

 

 

 

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

Rudd Hot American Summer: Ant-Man and the Wasp, Ideal Home, The Catcher Was a Spy

06 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by cinepam in Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Ant-Man and the Wasp, Ideal Home, Moe Berg, Paul Rudd, Steve Coogan, The Catcher Was a Spy

null

Paul Rudd shrinks and supersizes in Ant-Man and the Wasp, but his superhero character Scott Lang aka Ant-Man’s biggest gift remains his amiability in Marvel’s latest adventure, making him the only ant anyone would ever invite to a picnic. But while millions of people will have no trouble finding that insect, no matter how small, in theaters this summer, Rudd has two more movies out now, Ideal Home and The Catcher Was a Spy. And even if one of them presents as more of an intriguing failure than anything else, to play on the title of one of his classic comedies, this season presents a Rudd hot American summer.

null

Ant-Man and the Wasp

Even when he’s on the right side, ex-con Scott can’t help somehow being found in the wrong. Ant-Man and the Wasp opens with Lang nearing the end of house arrest, his punishment for taking part in that little rumble with The Avengers in Captain America: Civil War. He is looking forward to spending time with his daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) unrestricted to his own four walls and partnering with Luis (Michael Peña) and their pals on a new security firm. But Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and his daughter Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), who now has her own suit and superhero identity as the Wasp, have plans for the Ant-Man. Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part III, Scott keeps trying to get out, but they just keep pulling him back in, this time complicated by a corrupt restaurateur (Walton Goggins) and a young woman (Hannah John-Kamen) convinced Pym and Ant-Man hold the key to what ails her.

To say more, would give away too much of the story. Big stunts provide the thrills. If the Ant-Man and the Wasp doesn’t always make full use of its San Francisco setting, it makes up for it with scenes set in Muir Woods and on the famously crooked part of Lombard Street. Jokes, some involving a Pez dispenser and Morrissey, provide the laughs. Director Peyton Reed and a writing team that includes Rudd have a lot of fun with the Alice-in-Wonderland-type possibilities that arise out of people, animals, and objects that enlarge and miniaturize. If there is a race between the humor and the action, it’s a tie. Both are in abundance

Of this, Ideal Home, and The Catcher Was a Spy, this is the most classic Rudd: lovable guy with a killer sense of humor. Plus, he sings a Partridge Family oldie, “Come On, Get Happy.” Just a few bars, but enough to add another layer of giddy fun to the movie. With Ant-Man and his surroundings constantly changing sizes, the Ant-Man movies are clearly as dependent as any of the Marvel movies on special effects to make their larger-than-life tales come alive, yet with Rudd at their center, they are also the most purely human. That’s a wonderful thing.

Rudd 1_home

Ideal Home

Exactly 10 years ago, Rudd starred with Seann William Scott as a pair of boy-men who attempt to influence youth as reluctant volunteers in a Big Brother-type program in Role Models. A decade later and edging ever closer to 50, Rudd’s at it again, this time with Steve Coogan in Ideal Home, streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, and other platforms. Written and directed by Andrew Fleming, who previously made the underrated Coogan vehicle Hamlet 2, this screwball comedy stars the two as long-time partners who find themselves saddled with a 10-year-old kid who hides his vulnerability behind endless layers of hostility and sass.

The child is actually the grandson of Erasmus, the latest in the long line of comic narcissists that Coogan plays with such brilliance, a Santa Fe chef and host of a cooking show. Rudd is Paul, his long-suffering producer, as well as lover, who keeps threatening to decamp to New York and a job with Rachel Ray. The heart wants what it wants, so he stays. But the arrival of Bill (Jack Gore) throws the couple for a loop. Paul wasn’t even aware that Erasmus had a son from a long ago fling, let alone a grandchild. The imp, who won’t even tell them his name at first and refuses to eat anything but Taco Bell, adds another layer of tension to an already fraught relationship.

There are definite sitcom elements to the story’s unfolding, particularly as it races through its third act. A messier tale would have come to an equally predictable conclusion, but might have had more emotional resonance. Still, it is funny. Some of it is just built-in sight gags, particularly the sight of the oh-so-English Coogan in cowboy duds tooling about Erasmus’ desert home. The tart dialogue is also sharp, made more hilarious by Coogan and Rudd’s dipped-in-acid delivery. As a couple, they are kind of a car wreck, yet they are also a matched set in taste and bitter wit. Neither is exactly parent material – Erasmus admits he never tried to be part of his son’s life – but when presented with a child, paternal instincts kick in.

Just what is the Ideal Home? That’s the question the movie attempts to answer. Bill has clearly had a rough upbringing, but then so has dad Beau (Jake McDorman). How much of that might have to do with Erasmus’ total neglect, the movie doesn’t attempt to answer. But as Erasmus and Paul face teachers, social workers, courts, and Beau in their quest to make a home for the boy, they have to define for themselves as much as for anyone else just what a family is. And like those man-children in Role Models, it is from learning through sometimes disastrous interactions with a child, that these middle-aged adolescents might finally grow up themselves.

CATCHER_D018_IMG_3863.CR2

The Catcher Was a Spy

Rudd stretches his dramatic muscles to play a pro baseball player turned covert World War II agent in The Sessions‘ director Ben Lewin’s The Catcher Was a Spy. Unfortunately, the film—in limited release and streaming – serves neither actor nor subject well. What ought to be a rip-roaring yarn simply isn’t. Lewin was probably the wrong director for a story requiring a level of suspense, but the screenplay is also at fault. In adapting Nicholas Dawidoff’s book, screenwriter Robert Rodat never finds a way to make the cipher at the center of this tale a flesh-and-blood human being. Rudd’s considerable charm can only do so much.

The reality of Moe Berg was this. He was never a star, retiring with a .243 batting average. Nevertheless, he hung on through 15 seasons and four teams before finishing his career in 1939 with the Boston Red Sox. He was also a multilingual Princeton graduate with a law degree. His intellectualism made him an odd duck in dugouts, but so did the way he lived his life. He never married. The film intimates that he was bisexual (there is a frank sex scene with a live-in girlfriend played by Sienna Miller, but the drama is far more discreet in intimated same-sex encounters). And when war broke out, Berg joined the OSS, the precursor to the CIA where his ease with languages made him an asset in Europe.

The bulk of The Catcher Was a Spy follows Berg on a wartime mission to suss out where the Germans are in their attempts to beat the Allies to the development of the atom bomb. If Nazi success looks imminent, he has orders to kill Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg (Mark Strong), the scientist spearheading the program. This should be thrilling stuff with Berg and his cohorts evading death on the battlefields they must traverse and detection as they close in on their quarry. But the tension never rises. And because Berg himself is so opaque, we never get a sense of the urgency of the mission or Berg’s own feeling of danger.

The Catcher Was a Spy is an interesting story told in the most uninteresting way. Berg deserved better and so did the actor in role. –Pam Grady

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

Categories

  • Interviews
  • News
  • Reviews
  • Short Takes
  • Uncategorized

Recent Posts

  • Celebratory Hector Babenco doc streams in virtual film series highlighting 2021 international Oscar picks
  • Oh to be in GREENLAND at the end of the world
  • THE LAST VERMEER sketches out Dutch artist’s postwar peril
  • A monster in the White House in ’70s-era THE WEREWOLF OF WASHINGTON
  • A woman warrior claims her destiny in MULAN

Archives

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×
    loading Cancel
    Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
    Email check failed, please try again
    Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
    %d bloggers like this: