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October 30-November 5, 2008
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Dried and gory
by Michael Phillips
Acne, puberty and singing
by Tasha Robinson
Dried and gory
by Michael Phillips
You keep the rage, you cut the rest of it loose.” So says Jon Voight’s Manhattan police chief to his NYPD officer son, played by Noah Emmerich, in Pride and Glory. The line is very pulpy, no question, but Voight has a way of tossing it off that a) doesn’t oversell it, and b) suggests his character hasn’t cut the rest of it loose at all. The grime and loss and dead bodies have started to eat away at his morality.
Pride and Glory is full of interesting little grace notes, and the cast is excellent, yet it grows more and more frustrating. It has everything going for it except a story that doesn’t send the audience out miles ahead of the plot developments.
To be clear: Director and co-writer Gavin O’Connor, who wrote the script with Joe Carnahan, has no interest in treating his dirty-cops scenario, involving conflicted family loyalties and lots of drug money, as a mystery. Straight off it’s plain who’s clean, who’s on the take (or worse) and who’s in the middle. Edward Norton is the clean one, Detective Ray Tierney, a scandal-tainted officer now voluntarily consigned to Missing Persons. After a bloody ambush leaves four officers dead, Voight’s character arm-twists Ray, who is his son, into heading up the task force investigating the murders.
It’s a family affair all around: The dead men served under Ray’s officer brother, played by Emmerich. The Tierneys’ brother-in-law, Jimmy, played by Colin Farrell, is just shifty and jumpy and rageful enough to indicate a conspiracy. O’Connor’s main concern is to keep the dirty cops one step ahead of the clean ones while closing in on the drug lord responsible for the carnage. Most every scene is thuddingly on-point, and despite some pretty extreme violence — at one point Farrell’s borderline sociopath threatens the infant child of a drug dealer with a hot iron — you wait for Norton to get wise to the corruption sloshing all around him.
What works in Pride and Glory? The little things help, such as the way Voight hits his character’s degree of drunkenness at a family get-together just so, or the tenderness Emmerich brings to his scenes with his dying wife, played by the superb Jennifer Ehle. Norton’s solid, too, but he cannot make much of his largely functionary character’s reckoning. The plot is too familiar, too reliant on coincidence and expediency. Put it on the maybe-on-cable list along with last year’s We Own the Night. Remember that one?
—MCT
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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Acne, puberty and singing
by Tasha Robinson
The High School Musical series isn’t aimed at high schoolers, who presumably know by now that grades 9 through 12 aren’t actually a candy-coated wonderland. It’s more aimed at preteens who are still willing to bet high school will be the best thing ever. With those kids firmly in mind, the movies are achingly wholesome, set in a preposterously shiny world where everything looks if it were freshly painted within the last five minutes. The entire franchise is designed to accessorize with the shiniest lip gloss and the sparkliest pink nail polish.
Fortunately for series director Kenny Ortega, there are a lot of adolescent girls in the world. The first two High School Musical movies, made for TV’s Disney Channel, broke cable viewership records. The first film’s soundtrack was 2006’s top-selling record. The movies have spawned a touring concert, an ice show, a series of video games and young-adult novels, a reality show spin-off and a stage musical. If High School Musical 3: Senior Year, the franchise’s big-screen debut, comes anywhere close to the 18 million-plus viewership of High School Musical 2’s cable debut, it could rival the year’s other opening-weekend box-office records. Ortega and company could have a hit on their hands just for showing up.
Instead, they rise to the theatrical-release challenge by expanding the dance numbers while minimizing the drama. The core cast from the first two musicals is back, and now they’re all seniors, coming to terms with the possibility of graduation. (Actually, the guarantee of graduation, because their idealized version of school lacks classes and grades; it’s all lunchrooms, basketball courts and extracurricular fun.) Sweethearts Troy (Zac Efron) and Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) continue their sweet, chaste romance but face separation as they head to different colleges. Snob princess Sharpay (Ashley Tisdale) is once again scheming to grab Gabriella’s part in the big spring musical. The pressures of prom and the big championship game each get a little lip-service and a big musical number, but the problems blur by harmlessly to let the performers move on to the next piece of bouncy pop. Most of the returning cast has little to do but sing, dance and smile.
Musical 3 is frustratingly shallow, but what it lacks in narrative ambition, it makes up for in dazzling choreography. Ortega set out to channel cinema’s musical classics, from Singing in the Rain to Chicago — one of this film’s bigger numbers, “I Want It All,” contains a number of visual winks to those films and others. But his execution is as much Bollywood as Broadway. He crams the screen with spectacular, vivid colors and complicated synchronized movement, making the radio-ready, processed-pop songs distinctly secondary to the dances they inspire.
And in the process, he creates something harmlessly fluffy and fun, a slight but accomplished, entirely agreeable time-waster aimed at the High School Musical cultists but unlikely to offend anyone else. It isn’t a film so much as a rousing sing-along, clap-along dance party that seems to say, “We made it to the big screen — now let’s just kick back and celebrate.” Bring your prettiest pink paper hats, and party on.
—MCT
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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