The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)

“The Place Beyond the Pines” is a rare piece of work, a three-act morality crime thriller heavy on family throes, modeled -– in scope, length, and music-heavy beat -- on “Heat,” but subbing tiny New York town called Schenectady (great name!) for sprawling  Los Angeles. Director/co-writer Derek Cianfrance (“Blue Valentine”) casts Ryan Gosling as Luke, a carny motorcycle stuntman who learns that a one-night stand has produced a son. His jailhouse tattoos signify a hard-scrabble life, Luke but sees the Light in that baby boy’s face. But his way to get cash is criminally stupid, and with a crook, we must have a cop. Bradley Cooper is Avery, a law-school grad who drives a squad car. His story is Act 2. Act 3 jumps 15 years to the sons of cop and crook as the youth play out a track the other chapters deftly avoided: a finger-waving melodrama that fails against the previous action, including a true gut-punch shocker. Gosling and Cooper bring their best, and the actors playing the sons –- Emory Cohen and Dane DeHaan -– leap over the cliché roles. “Pines” could have been massive, daring follow-up for Cianfrance, but his need to dispel lessons breaks the spell. B-

The Untouchables (1987) and Gangster Squad (2013)

Double bill: Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables” with Elliot Ness versus Al Capone, and “Gangster Squad,” with L.A. cops against Mickey Cohen. Both are true cops-and-mobs stories repainted with Hollywood final blowout action scenes. Why allow Frank Nitti his suicide when Ness can toss him off a building? “Squad” plays looser with truth. 

Such is film. Facts hit the floor faster than bodies. In 200 words, my take downs on these mob take-down films.

“Untouchables” –- also based on the rah-rah TV show – follows Eagle Scout/U.S. Treasury agent Ness (Kevin Costner) as he brings in three like-minded heroes (Sean Connery as wise old cop, Andy Garcia as hothead cop, and Charles Martin Smith as nerd cop) to nail Robert De Niro’s Capone. Smart casting and smart-looking film. 

It smells of Chicago and spent bullets. De Palma and screenwriter David Mamet put us in gorgeous locales -– trains station, courthouses, and filthy red alleyways. Dialogue pops like spent lead: Connery barking about knives at a “gun party” is classic. 

I was 13 in ’87 and this became my Instant Favorite Film. The violence, male bravado, scope, and that shoot-out on the stairs. It’s a stellar cops-and-gangsters fantasy for… teenage boys. I’m wiser now, and the red-blood love has waned. This is a sloppy-ass film riddled with dubious continuity errors -– moving corpses, that wondering elevator in the assassination scene, a terrible voice dub throughout, and logic tossed aside in a courtroom finale. Too many scenes make me cringe. 

Was De Palma so in love with his own (admittedly great) style, he forgot the importance of details? Hell if I know. Costner is too fantastic to care. B+

“Squad” whiffs fake as “Untouchables” feels immersed in Chicago lore. You can smell the wet paint. I read Ellroy. Call me biased. Josh Brolin is WWII Army Special Forces vet John O’Mara, now a cop assigned to stop New York-bred Cohen (Sean Penn) from becoming the West Coast Capone.

O’Mara is very Ness to the point I believe writer Will Beall watched “Untouchables” on repeat. Lines are lifted whole. O’Mara also has his three heroes: Robert Patrick as wise old cop, Ryan Gosling as hothead cop, and Giovanni Ribisi as nerd cop. Toss in retro-progression with Anthony Mackie as a black patrolman and Michael Pena as a Hispanic flatfoot named Navidad. (Cringe.) 

Plot: O’Mara’s guys shoot the shit out of Cohen’s guys, who do the same back. Penn is comically spittle-tossing evil, his performance falls into hysterics. I laughed my ass off when a ridiculously dickensesque shoeshiner gets whacked. I gather director Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland”) wasn’t going for giggles among the blood and rape. 

As Ness says, “You aren’t from Chicago.” Do not pretend. C

Ides of March (2011)

See “Ides of March” for its standout cast. Ryan Gosling. George Clooney. Paul Giamatti. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Jeffrey Wright. Evan Rachel Wood. A Giamatti and Hoffman face off? How cool is that? They need a better movie. This grim political drama should torch the screen. It barely sparks a flame. It’s about a suave campaign director (Gosling) devoted to his governor boss (Clooney) who is eyeing the presidency. And then – bam! – our hero learns his boss is a loose cock. Shocker? Not to the audience. But to Gosling’s Stephen Myers, yes. In modern America!?! Go on, watch. See if you can pick up motives I did not. Why does the governor reek of a trite symbol and not a person, and his wife (Jennifer Ehle) barely human at all? Did Wood’s intern eye Stephen with an agenda? She must have. How can anyone as smart as Stephen still believe in the whole candidate-savior crap at age 30? The dialogue should sting “Sweet Smell of Success” style, but it slumps. Clooney directs, with grey skies, dark bars and kitchens. Shakespearean? No. Melodrama? From start to finish. The high grade is for the cast alone. B

Drive (2011)

Steve McQueen would faint. “Drive” is a soaked-in-blood B-Grade car chase flick living the A-Grade life, with a silent, stewing Ryan Gosling (“My Blue Valentine”) as Driver, a nameless Hollywood stunt man by day and a freelance wheelman by night. When he drives, cutting j-turns or racing past other cars, he does so with the exact precision of a brain surgeon. A toothpick sticks straight out of our hero’s closed mouth, as if it’s a holy cross, and biting on it will keep Driver’s tires spinning. He doesn’t sweat the cop car chases or the helicopter search lights, barely blinking as he turns and swerves and hides, the wide-eyed thieves in the backseat sweating and bopping around like loose grocery items.

Of course “Driver” is a Hollywood film itself, so there must be a lonely, pretty woman (Carey Mulligan) down the hallway, an oddball mentor (Bryan Cranston), and sadistic mobsters out to make the hero’s life hell. The heavies are played by Ron Perlman – turning his Hellboy hero upside down to pure-fire menace – and Albert Brooks – erasing decades of nice guy nerds by taking kitchen cutlery to a man’s head and throat. It’s a bristling, seething performance, and it deserves an Oscar nomination.

But don’t think Gosling is be lefty empty-handed against such villainy. As with Clint Eastwood as The Man with No Name and Kurt Russell as Snake Plisskin, Gosling’s acting is all in his glare, the slight movement of an eye against an opponent. For the first part of the film, one assumes he is just a driver for criminals, not prone to violence or crime. Wrong. He threatens a betraying woman, beats a man with a hammer and makes him swallow a bullet, and then ups the ante by beating a man to death. Gosling’s Driver does this seemingly without raising his pulse, a mere sweat mark, as if he’s just jogged a mile or two. A nice workout. Great performance.

There’s not a wasted moment in this economic film, shot similar to a late ’70s midnight feature that shows up on cable every now and then, and scored with a pulsating 1980s rock beat that sizzles. Hossein Amini’s screenplay is sparse, sharp. Gosling maybe has under 100 words. One great exchange: Brooks’ mobster wants to shake hands with Driver at the start of the film. Driver demurs. “My hands are dirty.” Grease and grime. “So are mine,” the man shoots back. Blood and sin.

Director Nicolas Winding Refn stages chases low to the ground, as if we’re following along on a jet-fueled skateboard. The fights and murders are doused with buckets of blood: A skull explodes wide open from a shotgun blast and when Driver stomps a man to death, we hear every crack of skull then the mushy plop of brain tissue. Wisely Refn pulls back the on-screen carnage toward the end for shadows and long shots. His prison drama “Bronson” was a shocking powerhouse film, but I thought his Viking flick “Valhalla Rising” was too artsy. Here Refn is in full gear, grinding the throttle until the engine gives, not sweating.

“Drive” doesn’t break new ground. The plot is, to put it mildly, familiar. So was “13 Assassins,” another summer winner for me. I’m not sure Mulligan pulls off her role: A mother and waitress barely scraping by money wise with a husband in prison. Most women in that position would be tired and frazzled. Her Irene seems more grad school track. But that’s Mulligan’s mug, I think. This past summer left us little in the way of pure adrenaline rushes, and “Driver” than fits the bill. I can’t wait to take it for another spin. A-

Blue Valentine (2010) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966)

Two films focusing on crumbling, spiraling marriages? Full of seething anger and pent-up hates and resentments, with love utterly and wholly defeated? This may be the double-billing from hell for some, but it makes for great cinema. “Blue Valentine” is a recent art-house hit, and it may gain cult status as wider and wiser audiences seek it out. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” – a needed follow-up, especially in light on Elizabeth Taylors’ death -- is hands-down one of the all-time, you-must-watch-this classics. Shockingly, the older film still is the darker of two, by light years.

“Blue” opens on a young married couple (Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams) and their daughter, and stays with them for a long weekend. A bad, soul-crushing weekend. The family dog escaped from the backyard pen and is missing. The high-speed rural highway below the house is not a good omen, and the dog is indeed found dead. This moment is the final crack in a crumbling marriage. But all is not grim.

We flashback to when Dean and Cindy first meet. He’s a high-school dropout who can barely get through a job interview for a moving company. She is fresh off a bad breakup, hails from an emotionally violent home, and yearns to be a doctor. They click, wonderfully and explicitly, but can it last? They rush toward marriage because Cindy is pregnant, and Dean wants to be a father and a husband, even if the child is not his. The question must be asked: Are they right for each other? Each so humanly, woefully flawed?

Writer/director Derek Cianfrance pulls no punches as the twin plots surges toward utter happiness (past) and absolute destruction (present). The last scene is perfect, as is much of the film (a run-in with the ex-beau doesn’t seem to work in retrospect, a shouted comment from a friend of Cindy’s is so out-there odd, it stops a big scene near dead). Williams and Gosling are funny, euphoric, devastating, sexy, sad, dire, and everything you could ever want or fear. The little girl playing the daughter is heartbreaking sweet. A-

If “Blue Valentine” is a knife to the gut, then “Virginia Woolf” is an atom bomb. Real-life married couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor play George and Martha, he an associate professor, she the daughter of the university president. The setting: A New England college, probably one of those small, private snob schools. After a drunken faculty party, George and Martha stumble home, and talk and flirt to no avail, and bicker a bit. And bicker some more. Just as a young professor and his wife come to the house – Martha unwisely invited them over at 2 a.m. – the bickering turns ugly. Flesh ripped from bone ugly.

For the rest of this one night, George and Martha filet each other, with the young couple (George Segal and Sandy Dennis) held hostage, scared to stay, and equally hesitant to leave. Two decades of bitterness, past hurts, accusations and anger are coming to a full, raging boil. The crux: George’s lack of ambition against Martha’s beloved “daddy,” the couple’s absent son, and the endless amounts of alcohol readily available. I can’t recall any other film where so much alcohol is poured and consumed. It is their fuel.

Directed by Mike Nichols, in his debut, this Edward Albee play just kills on screen. Just when you think there can be no more hate or vile petty anger, the film sinks lower. And the acting soars. “Woolf” won an armful of Oscars, and should have taken more. Taylor – in heavy makeup, packing on weight and slurring her voice – plays 20 years her senior, and Burton is as scary as Lector and sad as Job in his role.

Their infamous double marriage surely adds blood to the proceedings as George and Martha bait and trap each other with words of war, how can it not? (Google Burton’s acidic comment on Taylor’s win and his snub of an Oscar. Holy shit!) Segal and Dennis also burn bright as a couple with their own dirty laundry.

“Woolf” is a must-watch, for its acting, the cinematography, the mere gamesmanship of trying to out-think George and Martha as they slash into each other, snarling like animals, and for the final confrontation. A ripe 44 years old, “Woolf” still packs some of the most deeply biting dialogue ever filmed. A+