Reviews by Ken Burke
There are no reasonable links between this week’s movies (except for the psychotic nature of the villains in each one—although Jim Carrey’s Steve Gray in ... Burt Wonderstone is more of a wacko than an inherently bad guy, but villains are supposed to be unhinged, right?), so on we go to separate sets of comments on two very different experiences at the cinema.
A 911 operator tries desperately to rescue a teenage girl from a horrid killer in this well-structured, effective thriller that may be too disturbing for some in its content.
While I normally spend little time pondering the career challenges of 911 operators, now that I’ve seen Brad Anderson’s The Call I have a lot more conscious empathy for the inherent stress faced by these police dispatchers dealing with emergency after emergency from the frantic citizens of their communities (with the ensuing frustrations they must feel when these calls are simply information requests mistakenly placed to 911—although the harried responders, who must attempt to maintain calm and dignified no matter the nature of the callers’ requests, may secretly appreciate the intrusion of a “My cat’s stuck up in a tree!” plea just because for a few seconds at least they’re not having to juggle life-and-death possibilities). Halle Berry as Jordan Turner, an experienced and normally rock-solid master of the hotline in the eternally-buzzing “Hive” of the huge Los Angeles 911 call center, is effectively thrown off her game in The Call when she makes the huge mistake early in the movie of using a call-back attempt to reconnect with a very frightened teenager who’s hiding in her bedroom, trying to elude a dangerous intruder when the phone connection is accidently dropped. The intruder, hearing the ring, goes right to his victim, which leads to her kidnapping and death, with the body discovered a few days later. This shakes up Jordan so badly that when we reconnect with her 6 months later she’s now a trainer of new recruits rather than fielding 911 calls herself, despite the encouragement she gets from her devoted cop boyfriend, Paul Phillips (Morris Chestnut), and empathetic co-workers such as Flora (Denise Dowse). Well, we wouldn’t have a movie here if everything stayed calm and collected—especially a movie as well-structured and well-acted as this one—so something needs to go wrong, which it does with a vengeance when the same cold-hearted killer strikes again, this time snatching another teenager with long, blonde hair, Casey Welson (Abigail Breslin, very almost-grown-up from her previous memorable screen presence as Olive Hoover in Little Miss Sunshine [Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris, 2006; Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for Breslin, along with wins for Alan Arkin, Best Supporting Actor (more on him below), and Michael Arndt, Best Original Screenplay]). Because Casey is in her abductor’s car trunk she’s able to make cell-phone contact with Jordan (who has to get involved when the situation is beyond the skills of the rookie operator who originally takes the call), allowing our already-in-motion plot to really pick up speed, even as we see most of this action presented with intensifying closeups not just of Casey in the trunk but everyone else as well—along with rapid editing between various locations, further ratcheting up the action—magnifying everyone’s very personal experiences as Jordan is trying desperately to make up for her previous mistake by willing this victim to survive, even as she struggles with her profession’s prime directives to “Stay emotionally detached” and "Don't promise anything."
What ups the stakes drastically for Jordan is that at some point the abductor, Michael Foster (Michael Eklund), catches Casey with her cell phone and talks a bit with Jordan. She recognizes his voice as being the same victimizer that she also had a brief interchange with on the occasion of Leah Templeton’s (Evie Thompson) tragedy those 6 months ago. The horror in Jordan’s face upon this realization indicates clearly how this revelation pushes aside all of her newly-regained self-confidence from keeping up her chatter with Casey, using the scant information she can glean from the situation to try to both locate the traveling car within the enormous maze of L.A. freeways and determine who this crazed abductor is. Unfortunately, the cell phone Casey is using is one of those non-traceable disposable models that her friend accidently left on the food-court table as they finished their lunch at the mall before Casey was grabbed in the parking garage. Maniacal Mr. Foster Freeze (A bad pun on the killer’s name, combining his icy personality and that of a great old-time-fast-food-drive-in chain all over California, including many in the greater L.A. area; sorry, Fosters, for implying a bad rap for you here, but I couldn’t pass up the sordid verbal opportunity. If any of you hoards of readers want some great burger-joint food and are in the vicinity of a Fosters Freeze [locations available for your consideration at http://www.fostersfreeze.com/] I recommend you check them out) is a fierce, obsessively-driven bad dude who knows very precisely his needed methods of operation, so he smashes Casey’s own phone, never realizing that she has a back-up. Jordan is just as well-versed in her career so she does some first-class police work with what little info she has, directing Casey to kick out one of the taillight modules so that she can wave her arm, then pour paint (conveniently located in the trunk, just like those many Fosters Freezes are just down the block from you) out of the newly-created hole, which leads to other 911 calls from following cars that allow the abductor’s location to be somewhat narrowed down but not in such a timely manner as to get police to the scene, especially when a well-meaning fellow driver pulls up alongside Michael to tell him that he’s inadvertently leaving a stripe of white paint along the freeway. Fortunately for Jordan and Casey, when Michael stops to see what’s up in the trunk the girl manages to hide her cell phone before his threat to not try any more tricks lest he kill her on the spot. Unfortunately for the guy who noticed the paint and decided to pull off as well to see what was up with the mysterious situation, Michael attacks and kills him before he can make his own 911 call (blaming Casey in his deluded anger, as if she were responsible for motivating his cold-hearted crimes). The cell phone is still active, though, so Jordan gets a sense of what’s happening but can’t begin to know what other atrocities are soon to be committed by this maniac.
Just as Berry is very effective in her balance of panic toward the situation and determination to not let a solution elude her, Eklund and Breslin are equally well cast as demented killer and terrified, overmatched victim. Through fingerprints mistakenly left at the scene of the curious-driver killing the cops are able to identify Foster, who’s essentially the most interesting, complex character in the whole movie even though his role is just necessary antagonist to allow Berry’s protagonist to triumph in the end as expected. However, even though I try to be clear in the home page of this blog and in other places about the Two Guys’ guilt-free use of spoilers in these a-few-days-after-release reviews to enable the explorations to go where they must, I’ll repeat the ongoing Spoiler Alert warning here, for the remainder of this review of The Call (no big problems with this in the next review as I don’t think you need to bother with … Burt Wonderstone anyway), because if you have any interest in seeing The Call then you certainly don’t want to know what I’m about to explore regarding the rest of this movie which is purposely not even hinted at in the preview trailers. So, if you’re still with me we’ll turn back to Michael Foster, who’s not only the same guy who kidnapped and killed young Leah as our story began but also has killed other attractive teens with long, blonde hair as part of his obsession with his now-dead sister who was suffering from an unspecified disease (but one in which the illness itself or the treatments caused her to lose her own beautiful mane) when apparently Michael relieved her of her suffering in a bloody manner, then burned down the family home seemingly to erase all evidence of the crime—none of this is spelled out in typical after-the-fact-homicide-report fashion but is put forth in small bits of evidence for us to surmise meaning from as Jordan searches the killer’s abandoned cabin and finally finds his underground lair; in the process she stumbles across a photo album and a horrifying recreated bloody bedroom where Michael enacts his fantasies that have echoes of the demented assassin Buffalo Bill whom Agent Clarice Starling finally terminates in the multi-Oscar-winning (1 of 3, along with It Happened One Night [Frank Capra, 1934] and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest [Milos Forman, 1975] to take the Big 5 of Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and one of the Screenplays [the Adapted one for all 3 of these]) Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991). Foster (Michael, not Jodie from Silence … if all of these films are starting to run together for you), from what we surmise from the family photos, didn’t just admire his older sister he apparently was in love with her and had more than platonic plans for them which were terminated, along with her, by the disease (in one image in the photo album he’s kissing her while she’s seemingly unconscious so I guess he used a timer on the camera for this gruesome shot).
Even though he’s gone on to lead an outwardly normal life with a wife and at least one child (that’s all I saw in a brief scene in his home, but there is a reference to “children” later on), he’s still pining for his sister and seemingly is in search of a scalp with hair similar to hers that he can put on a mannequin head in that awful cellar instead of a long, blonde wig, but his victims so far don’t quite fit the mannequin so he keeps capturing new ones in a ghastly alternative completely unknown to his immediate family (and, of course, you’ve noted hints of Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho in this also but that’s been beaten to death [so to speak] in the recent Hitchcock [Sacha Gervasi, 2012; reviewed at this blog in our Dec. 14, 2012 posting] so I won’t dwell on that any further). Casey has good reason to be terrified of this madman, which Breslin conveys quite convincingly, but even though she makes several escape attempts he’s just too overpowering for her, resulting in an innocent filling-station attendant being burned to death after a gasoline dousing when she tries to escape into the back seat while Michael stops for a quick fill-up (with her ordeal intensified by him having tossed the body of the dead motorist into the truck to keep her company, with the further twist that he’s not even dead yet—but he will be soon enough by Foster’s usual brutality, this time with a screwdriver) and then her hope of exiting the cellar after temporarily breaking away from Michael also failing as she ends up in the reconstructed “bedroom” where her scalp is destined to join the other attempts at reviving at least a tangible memory of his long-dead sister.
But even though Casey on her own isn’t enough of a match for meaner-than-Hell Michael, she soon gets reinforcements in the form of Jordan, who had temporarily given up all hope when the second cell phone ran out of battery life and the probable hideout location of an old Foster family cabin yielded no evidence of abductor nor abductee. In a simple but nicely-conceived overhead nighttime shot of the Santa Clarita mountains area where the cabin is located we see a couple of police cars with lights flashing heading away from their fruitless search as Jordan’s car passes them going toward the cabin because she’s determined to follow what little trail she has in a last-minute attempt to save Casey from the same fate that she allowed to happen to Evie. By chance she comes across the hidden entrance to the cellar out back from the cabin, quietly enters, finds Casey alive as Michael is preparing for the scalping before killing her (he even gets as far as initial incision), and then attacks just in time, knocking him out so she can release Casey from her bondage. Of course, he’s not going down that quickly, though, so a furious struggle ensues, with the women almost making it up the ladder to safety before he snags Jordan’s legs. However, when it’s all over he’s been pushed back into the cellar entrance, falling to the floor below into a state of much greater unconsciousness, from where it would be easy to just lock the door, call the cops, and see him sent off to justice. That, nevertheless, depends on your definition of “justice.” At Casey’s suggestion, they decide not to call the police yet (with the further, expected wrinkle that Jordan’ love, Officer Phillips, has been the one on the case all day, trying furiously to catch the perp but also hoping to get closure for Jordan’s all-consuming guilt over contributing to Leah’s earlier mutilation and murder) but offer a story later that Jordan simply came to the scene and found escaped Casey wandering in the woods, with no idea what became of Michael. What will become of Michael, we surmise, will be a slow, brutal death because Jordan and Casey tie and chain him to a chair so that he cannot escape nor does anyone else (including his bewildered wife) know about the hidden cellar so there’s no likely rescue in sight for him, just their torturous revenge murder in retaliation for his many previous atrocities.
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
An amazing amount of talent put to little good use in this story of many magicians, their feuds and inevitable resolutions. Some decent laughs but it's just too contrived.
In that this is a totally separate review, I’m not looking for transitions from The Call, but if you need one then the silliness of “Call Me Maybe”* is relevant for a shift of topic into Don Scardino’s The Incredible Burt Wonderstone because, while there are some simple homilies about treating your friends decently and appreciating the good intentions of those around you while not letting your own fame overtake your better judgment, … Burt Silverstone is much more of a wasted opportunity than a magical experience, with a tremendous cast (even with some of the minor roles, as played by James Gandolfini, Jay Mohr, Brad Garrett, and David Copperfield as himself) bouncing from one flat situation to the next, so if we’re still looking for overall tie-ins for this posting then I’ll reference my title, “Where’s your emergency?“ (the opening question from The Call’s 911 operators), to say that in … Burt Wonderstone the emergency is in the script, which is still yearning for a real final draft instead of the one that ate up an estimated $30,000,000 budget (mostly in salaries, I’m sure) to get this mess onto the screen. The problem is not with putting too many talented comedians into one movie so that they get in each other’s way (even the not-great-but-still-much-more-effective-than-Incredible-Burt movie Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy [Adam McKay, 2004] with Will Ferrell, Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, Christina Applegate, Seth Rogen, Fred Willard, and many others can justify this claim that a large cast of beloved talent can be very productive), the problem with … Burt Wonderstone is that there’s not a lot of reason for much of anything in this story to lead to useful humor while a lot of what Jim Carrey’s “cutting edge” (literally, in his first scene as he slices open his own cheek to reveal a hidden playing card) masochist magician does is just self-destructive physical endurance rather than anything that resembles magic (but that’s probably the point of the character, who emulates the sad reality that “reality” TV has indoctrinated viewing audiences to watch any tortuous inanity for “pleasure” [see Johnny Knoxville’s Jackass franchise (TV series 2000-2002; movies in 2002, 2006, 2007, 2010, 2011 [all directed by Jeff Tremaine])—or, better yet, don’t see any of this), so I encourage you to not needlessly torture yourself further with … Burt.
Three of the main players here are Steve Carell as Burt Wonderstone (Winselstein by birth, but you know the demands for jazzy showbiz names), long a famous practitioner of the celebrated art of deception along with his friends-since-boyhood partner, Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi). Also in this photo to your left is their assistant, Jane (Olivia Wilde), but in the act she’s known as Nicole, just as a previous long line of “Nicole”s have played the role and been fired when they somehow crossed imperious Burt. She’s an aspiring magician herself but has no chance of being treated as a co-equal by her famous bosses, especially with the ever-expanded ego of Burt, who’s grown far too content with maintaining the same structure of the act for decades including their opening music (“Abracadabra” from the Steve Miller Band in 1982 [here’s the very old music video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH850qp85Zk, with a visual style quite in keeping with the sentiments of this movie]), the
same old opening patter (“But of course you know that …” [the names of the performers, who’ve obviously been playing in the same Las Vegas casino/hotel for years to a dedicated following]), and the carefully-rehearsed tricks (primarily the one where Wonderstone and Marvelton change places on the stage as they play a game of Hangman even though both are seemingly in plain sight, although cloaked in heavy robes and hoods, the entire time). Their boss, the hotel owner, Doug Munny (Gandolfini)—an ironic name with layers of nuance when used with the deconstructionist gunfighter played by Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven (directed by Eastwood also, 1992, and, like others I’ve referenced this week, a big Oscar winner [Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (Gene Hackman), Film Editing]) but just an obvious joke in … Burt Wonderstone—is concerned that the act is getting stale, a concept completely foreign to Burt who’s gone from 1982 childhood wonderment with magic as an escape from a hostile world where his double-shift-working mother could give him little comfort and other kids delighted in harassing him to being a self-absorbed entertainment god (at least in his own perception) where his only aspiration concerns which audience member he’ll take to his enormous bed (”Biggest in Las Vegas!”) tonight, while his distorted vision of his own importance has put him at odds with long-time friend and partner, Anton. Essentially, he’s a once-bright star ready for burnout, which he eventually brings on himself by his refusal to understand that he’s frozen himself in a long-disappeared era while there are more current, more dynamic trends that are threatening to replace him, just as he so cavalierly replaces the various Nicoles who play the Vanna White role for his incessant demands.
A primary threat to the ongoing dominance of Burt and Anton in the world of commercial magic is Steve Gray (Jim Carrey), who reaches a larger audience on a weekly basis than do our old-school celebrities because he’s on a cable channel (Intense TV). Admittedly, what he does isn’t so much magic as it is self-torture—cutting his body to reveal a hidden object (as noted above), driving a nail into a table with his forehead, sleeping on a bed of hot coals, keeping his eyes open for hours, holding his urine for 12 days (even Johnny Knoxville must stand—or squirm—in awe of that)—but his ever-increasing audience eats it up and makes him a prime contender for Doug Munny’s lavish new operation, simply called DOUG, where he’d be the resident magic show instead of Burt and Anton, except by the time we get that far into the plot Anton has split because of Burt’s arrogance, followed by Jane/Nicole, who ends up with Gray just for the job security not because she’s in any way impressed by his demeanor or intentions, which are focused solely on his material success, so much so that he still finds it necessary to one-up Burt at every trick that the now-fading-has-been attempts at Doug’s son’s mammoth birthday party. Steve is just as much as a self-absorbed jerk as Burt had become before he lost his great gig at Bally’s ballyhooed hotel (run by Doug), suddenly finding himself friendless, unwanted by those in the business (hence the Copperfield cameo), and reduced to pulling unappreciated parlor tricks at Peaceful Oasis, an old entertainers’ home. Carrey has been praised by many critics for his return to gonzo personality for this role, and I must admit that he’s completely invested in being monomaniacal in his “tricks” (most of which are really more self-imposed endurance tests), funny in a certain way for the intensity of his portrayal, but more disturbing (or disturbed) than anything, setting us up to laugh at his audition “trick” for the DOUG gig by pushing a drill bit into his skull, in hopes that he finds just the right angle to keep from destroying part of his brain function. (I guess the absurdity of this within the context of the overall mild insanity of … Burt Wonderstone can be read as humorous—in that you know he’ll no more kill nor disable himself than will that never-say-die-although-he-should-be-dead-by-now Wile E. Coyote in those Warner Bros. Roadrunner cartoons—but to me it’s just sad that we’ve become conditioned to laugh at such self-chosen self-mutilation. And, again, I realize that logic isn’t intended to be in play much in this movie’s activities, but I can’t help thinking that if this is the trick that will get him the DOUG job, what can he do on a nightly basis to keep up that kind of personal bodily assault before he runs out of ways to not kill himself).
The other major player here is past-Oscar-winner (noted in the other review above) and 2012-contender-again for the Best Supporting Actor statuette (for Ben Affleck’s Argo), Alan Arkin, playing the old master magician, Rance Holloway, whose TV appearance first inspired Burt to immerse himself in the deceptive arts for an audience’s pleasure but whose presence (and life) has almost faded away, to the point that he’s a resident of the retirement home where Burt attempts to perform. Reconnecting with his original inspiration gives Burt a renewed (and totally expected) sense of purpose that allows him to shed his former arrogance, reunite with Anton and Jane, and challenge Steve Gray with a trick that seems beyond plausibility (of course, by that point it doesn’t hurt—except to Steve—that his drill bit gambit didn’t go quite right so he’s already lost enough of his coherence [but of course, none of his higher functions; this is a comedy after all, no matter how unfunny many of its aspects play out] not to be a competitive threat for the DOUG contract). Through a hastily-clarified series of shots right at the end of the movie we see how Burt and Anton manage to pull off the greatest trick they could ever imagine: making the audience disappear from the hotel theatre to arrive at a field somewhere near the casinos, whose lights are still twinkling in the background (and if you look hard enough you’ll probably see some forensics experts from CSI digging up a body and running all sorts of exotic tests on it), then suddenly finding themselves back in the theatre again. But just like any of this “magic,” it’s all diversionary, except this time the diversion is carried out by the vapors from a plant that Anton discovered while working unsuccessfully with native Latin American jungle tribes (where we find that while he’s less ego-centered than Burt he still didn’t realize that these poor people want food and clean water, not silly magic tricks), vapors that bring on instant short-term unconsciousness which allows a crew of people-movers (not the Disneyland kind from a few decades ago but just guys hauling around temporarily limp bodies) to pile the audience into trucks and transport them to the outdoor location. While this is a cute bit that secures the new contract for reunited friends Burt, Anton, and new partner Jane, it’s also a quick joke with little concern for follow-through as there’s no indication how the whole audience is knocked out again once the trick has run its course outdoors nor do we have any sense that such a scam could be pulled off night after night without anyone around the rear doors of the hotel theatre noticing the patrons being tossed around like so many oversized bags of rice.
But, again, this is silly comedy, not a logic smackdown, so just flow with it if it amuses you. Me, I got some chuckles out of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, but I’d have been even more satisfied just to watch a new episode of CSI—or even a rerun—or catch a Copperfield magic special; those are both known quantities, just like Burt and Anton’s traditional act, but at least they’re still entertaining, which is more than I can consistently say for Burt and company. With this cast of superb comics and the fascination available in a movie about the mystery and wonder of magic, with its dazzling impact even as we know that it’s all a clever trick which most of us will never learn the secret of, this could have been a marvelous experience, but for me it just didn’t come together and has earned one of the lowest ratings I’ve yet given in the several months that I’ve been doing these reviews. If, as San Francisco Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle asserts, Jim Carrey’s unbound lunatic character, Steve Gray, is the most triumphant aspect of this almost-two-hour attempt at audience fascination, then maybe I should end on a lunatic note (or the several notes that it takes to comprise a song) and steer you to something else entirely, a musical celebration of lunacy as performed in Japan in 1998 by Billy Joel and Elton John, Joel’s “You May Be Right” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9mdkOjcKt4. Rock on, magic and music lovers, until your wayfaring critic rambles this way again next week, hopefully with something more magical than The Incredible Burt Wonderstone.
If you’d like to know more about how to place The Call here are some suggested links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8Db3qMwZgU (short interview with actors Halle Berry, Morris Chestnut, and Abigail Breslin)
If you’d like to know more about what’s behind the curtain with The Incredible Burt Wonderstone here are some suggested links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_S3qapJOjs&playnext=1&list=PLCARv-v6LX5L7TC1BlSJw8PnBAUFAat4Y&feature=results_main (a cluster of 22 short videos with clips from the film and short interviews with Jim Carrey, Steve Carell, David Copperfield, Steve Buscemi, Olivia Wilde)
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FINALLY: If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here please use my new email at kenburke409@gmail.com. Thanks.
By the way, if you’re ever at The Hotel California knock on my door—but you know what the check out policy is so be prepared to stay for awhile. Ken
P.S. Just to show that I haven’t fully flushed Texas out of my system here’s an alternative destination for you, Home in a Texas Bar , with Gary P. Nunn and Jerry Jeff Walker.
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