The Upside of Anger (☆☆)
R,118 minutes. South Wind 12
The Upside of Anger's biggest problem is that it doesn't know what it is. Is it a dark comedy? Drama? Lighthearted farce? It is an awkward combination of all three. It takes serious subjects, such as alcoholism, broken homes and statutory rape, and Lord knows what the audience is supposed to do with them. The movie is comparable to making a joke at someone's funeral, when it's just not appropriate to be funny.
Joan Allen plays Terry, mother of four daughters, whose husband has just left her for his Swedish secretary. This upsets her so much that she spends the first 45 minutes of the movie drunk, without ever knocking back a drink. The daughters (Alicia Witt, Keri Kussell, Erika Christensen and Evan Rachel Wood) act more mature than their mother and don't seem that upset that their father has just left them without saying a word and their mother is a serious alcoholic.
In a supporting turn, Kevin Costner plays Denny, a drunkard, ex-baseball player (what else?) who likes to drop by Terry's house uninvited and stay for dinner. Because Denny and Terry spend so much time drinking together, it is only fitting that they end up sharing a bed, as well as a bottle.
Watching Joan Allen, I couldn't help but think of Nicolas Cage's performance in Leaving Las Vegas. Both of those performances strike the same note of watching someone self-destruct with hard alcohol that's hard to watch but hard to stop watching.
Allen nails her role and Costner is solid, but the two don't have much chemistry. Some of the other plot turns in the movie are just plain weird: One daughter gets a mysterious illness that is never explained; the 18-year-old daughter starts dating a whiny radio producer who is more than twice her age; another daughter tries to get a boy to like her by saying she's "from a broken home." Then the movie jokes about these things. This would be forgivable if the jokes were funny, but instead they come off as awkward.
Jon Ralston
The Final Cut
Movie ( ☆☆ )
DVD ( ☆☆ )
PG-13, 94 minutes
Images courtesy of www.movies.yahoo.com
In one of last year's more ambitious, little-seen movies, Robin Williams plays Alan Hakman, a high-tech professional in an omnipresent media company named EYE Tech. The enterprise sells implants to wealthy couples, which are inserted into the brain at birth and record lifelong memories. Hakman splices together the images, called Zoe footage, for loved ones to watch at memorial services and gravesites.
Written and directed by rookie filmmaker Omar Naim, The Final Cut is a moody piece of cinema, aided considerably by master cinematographer Tak Fujimoto (The Silence of the Lambs, The Sixth Sense) and a propulsive score composed
by Brian Tyler. The sci-fi elements recall such recent films as Minority Report and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But those movies, for all of the high concepts they threw around, were rigorous storytelling workouts. The Final Cut is more schematic and dramatically flat.
Naim's most absorbing script development involves a deceased attorney and the young daughter he sexually abused. Hakman must delete the incriminating evidence from the attorney's Zoe footage. That's a solid dramatic obstacle. The rest of the film consists of internal struggles and familiar existential musings.
Williams seems to work best these days as an outsider with secrets to keep. In One Hour Photo, the actor invited us to shudder at the dark recesses of Sy Parrish's mind. Here, he's miscast as the Everyman. When left without a strong personality to play off of, Williams tends to have trouble disappearing into his role.
In addition to three negligible deleted scenes, the Lions Gate DVD features a 25-minute behind-the-scenes documentary. It's clear that everyone involved thought they were making a cautionary tale about the coming surveillance age. The idea never fully coheres in the finished product, and this intriguing film debut could make for a terrific remake someday.
—Stephen Shupe
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