Layer Cake sweet

Matthew Vaughn the director of Layer Cake previously produced Guy Ritchie’s films. Now Vaughn is being courted by the major studios (He has already become attached and detached from X-MEN 3.) and rightly so, his directorial finesse shines in the stratum of Layer Cake. Whether an odd angle to establish a scene or a plot with so many turns that Layer Cake attempts to out-confuse the myriad storytelling of Big Sleep, Vaughn keeps the attention on the characters and their race to unload a stolen shipment that is caught between more than one party. The gangs range from Amsterdam based émigrés from the latest war torn country to English drug dealers posing as gentlemen to undercover informants to legit detectives on the take. Throw in a missing daughter and the best use of rock songs on a soundtrack since a Tarantino film and each bite of this cake is delicious.
There’s a trend in English gangster films where a couple of films released in a short span become cult hits years later. Take Get Carter and The Italian Job (Michael Caine) from the late 60s/early 70s or Mona Lisa and The Long Good Friday (Bob Hoskins) from the 80s. Currently we have a modern gangster, half-genteel, half-snarling, exemplified by Clive Owen (Wake Me When I’m Dead) or Daniel Craig in Layer Cake. Craig is rumored to be the next James Bond and Bond’s new owner Sony is prepping Casino Royale. If this was a perfect world Sony would actually make a literal version of that first Bond novel.

Millennials

The website for Ray Hafner’s movie project says Two Kids, A Camera, A Million Voices. Hafner and Derek Franzese are producing a documentary they will digitally shoot this summer. The documentary focuses on what Hafner called “my generation.”
Millennials, the film’s working title and the academic name of the current generation, will drive across America with a Canon XL2 seeking the answer of what makes today’s kid tick, tock or click.
Speaking with Hafter at a local coffee house he indicated in one of his college textbooks a list of birth years that group people together regardless of their political views or value systems. To start with the Millennials (1982 to the present), and go backwards a hundred years we would encounter Gen X’ers (1961-1981), Baby Boomers (1943-1960), The Silent Generation (1925-1942), the G.I. Generation (1901-1924), and the Lost Generation (1883-1900).
“One generation does drugs for pleasure, another generation does drugs to study,” noted Hafner adding “A kid today doesn’t consider oral sex as sex.”
Hafner has spread the word via their website as well as sites that cater to millennial style thinking like Facebook . Franzese attends UT and was in John Pierson’s film class. One class project was to follow the progress of the film Cavite, a film also shot digitally. “They sold the camera after they shot it to buy the computer to edit it on. Making a movie like this is such a millennial thing to do,” said Hafner.

Cinderella Man not quite fairy tale

The summertime is a moment where some of the year’s most expensive films duke it out. But in this critic proof era can a bad film be a box office champion? Does a bear do its thing in the woods? Is the new Pope Catholic? Does a duck waddle barefoot?
While my gray locks might suggest age if not quite wisdom they are not quite old enough to recall the era of the Cinderella Man, James Braddock. The only time I had previously heard that phrase was from a 1936 film by Frank Capra, Mr. Deeps Goes To Town starring Gary Cooper. It’s the cute yellow journalism name given Coop by Jean Arthur. The Depression era tale relates what happens when a regular guy inherits a fortune and was recently remade (with the Capra-esque social relevance removed) as an Adam Sandler vehicle.
The stories of Deeds, Seabiscuit and Cinderella Man all show strength through character during the adverse economic times of the 1930s and each came to my personal attention mainly because of the movies.
A Google search on the phrase Cinderella Man turned up over 3 million websites. It was all the way at the bottom of the 7th page before a link leads one to a site about James Braddock, with each and every previous entry referring to the new film about Braddock by Ron Howard (starring Russell Crowe and Renee Zellweger). Perhaps this illustrates the proliferation of Internet movie sites that know how to list key phrases in their source code rather than any great interest in the history of boxing.
Cinderella Man was the nickname given Braddock who upset reigning boxing champ Max Baer (father of Jethro from the Beverly Hillbillies) for the heavyweight championship of the world on June 13, 1935. Cinderella Man should be the lump in throat, comes from behind, feel good film of the year especially considering how Howard himself has matured as a director with films like A Beautiful Mind (one reel felt like it could have been in a Scorsese film) and the gutsy The Missing.
Cinderella Man is a big step backwards for Ron Howard, dramatically and creatively, and the film will not have the legs to go more than a couple of rounds before the ref starts the count. Technically the film has a gritty Depression-era look with browns and dark hues dominating, and a very old fashioned pace almost as if Howard was trying to make the best film of 1955. Once or twice Howard slips in a modern film reference like a subliminal edit or modulates the color scheme, but overall Cinderella Man moves with the glaciers.
I should like this film more, I mean the protag Braddock (Crowe) and his wife Mae (Zellweger) and their three kids live with pride in a hovel that makes my Montrose apartment look like a manse. And this particular story hasn’t been told, plus like Raging Bull it involves pugilism in a big way but is not necessarily a boxing movie.
The film goes sideways, and Howard loses his way by wavering on whether to make the story center on underdog inspiration or social critique. Braddock hears his friend Mike (Paddy Considine) constantly talking about better days for labor and several scenes take place as Braddock and Mike slave for pennies on the docks. Yet as Mike is found dead after a riot when police bust a shantytown in Central Park any hope of a running thread of social realism throughout the film evaporates.
Cinderella Man exists as a powerful acting vehicle for Crowe, a thesp who pulls no punches. It would’ve been a better move to release this film in November based on award noms for Crowe’s acting chops rather than trying to recapture the magic that Seabiscuit displayed in his summer stint two years ago.
Please, Ron Howard, direct more comedies like Night Shift. Heck, do a remake of Night Shift with Adam Sandler. You have your Oscar, we know you can be serious. It’s just that the more serious you get the more the audience nods off.

ENRON: Not too smart

Last month I attended the regional premiere of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room in Austin. Filmmaker Alex Gibney, along with reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind on whose book the movie was based, spoke to the audience after the screening. Enron: TSGITR weaves through a paper and electronic trail of a scandal that still unravels. How much more timely could a film be?
Taking questions from the packed house, Gibney noted that a number of people feel whistleblower Sherron Watkins acted out of a profit motive although this was not mentioned in the film. “In my view she didn’t know about the fraud for a long time. But it’s inaccurate that she is a whistleblower because the first person she reported this to was Ken Lay,” he said.
Responding to a question about why he neglected referring to Clinton era deregulators in the film Gibney declared “There were advantages that the Clinton administration gave to Enron but they were not as great as the way in which the Bush family helped Enron, early on then later on.” McLean added: “It was in the waning years of the Clinton administration that the commodities futures trading commission passed a rule that exempted Enron’s trading operations from any kind of oversight. It was a widespread deregulatory ethos that prevailed during all the 1990s.”