Ricki and the Flash

*1/2 out of ****

Meryl Streep plays an aging rock singer in Ricki and the Flash, not because she's perfect for the role, but because she hadn't done it yet. I find it embarrassing to call this movie disappointing, because I found the trailer to be such a turnoff, that it’s amazing I was able to maintain a little faith in the people involved in its making. After Young Adult, I had finally come to like Diablo Cody as a screenwriter; aging director Jonathan Demme has proved, with films like Rachel Getting Married, that he still has a strong empathetic vision and a love for music; and Meryl Streep always has something new to prove.

The film focuses on Streep as the title character, the singer of a Rock cover band that plays regularly at a blue-collar California bar. Ricki, while out of money, goes to visit her estranged well-off family in Indiana due to a crisis with one of her grown children, Julie (Mamie Gummer). Ricki’s ex-husband, Pete (Kevin Kline), is the most welcoming while Julie and her two siblings reasonably resent the mother who rejected them during childhood, in search of success as a musician.

This seems like a good concept for a movie, but it never comes together in an impressive way. Even with the benefit of Mamie Gummer, Streep’s real-life daughter, in the cast, I still didn’t believe the film’s characters could have ever shared a kinship and I found a lot of the dramatic scenarios, to be forced and unbelievable (This was the problem I had with Cody's work in Juno).

Segments involving Ricki and the Flash - the band - are among the only ones that seem close to the heart of a director who once raised the bar for filming live concerts. Along with the inclusion of Rick Springfield as Ricki's frustrated on/off boyfriend, the band members are played by Rick Rosas, Bernie Worrell, and Joe Vitale -all veterans of famous bands. 

A strange amount of this movie concentrates on Streep's character as a blue-collar republican version of a free-spirit who can't live up to the sophistication of her liberal family members - including the gay son she never understood - but can bring a little "rock and roll" into their stuffy lives -especially during the lame climax, where the crowd Ricky plays for are such a generic version of classy snobs, that I thought they belonged in an Adam Sandler movie. This film is attempting some kind of weird cultural statement, but its lost on me.

Irrational Man

** out of ****

Woody Allen’s Irrational Man is a typical weak entry in his movie-a-year body of work, where he's obviously falling back on old ideas, but with nothing fresh to apply. It has a good plot that probably required a little more thought and time than this busy, aging auteur was willing to put in. 

His Rhode Island-set drama about a depressed college professor – played by Joaquin Phoenix - who feels uplifted through the planning of a perfect murder, seemed to dance around some heavy moral and philosophical concepts but none of these elements seemed to gel.

Still, the dialogue and narration between Phoenix and Emma Stone - as his student - contains a lot of analytical banter that may be exactly what turns people off from Allen’s work, but I’ve always found refreshing when compared to the unending list of movies with characters who don’t seem to think at all.

I guess I don't need to spell out that this is not funny Woody Allen, it's the bitter dark drama territory he brought us with Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point. Although, this time he scores it with upbeat jazz piano. I'm not sure what he was thinking, but it's a collision of tone and meaning. 

Mr. Holmes

*** out of ****

Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes stars Ian McKellen as the classic Arthur Conan Doyle detective –now an elderly man in poor health as he stays in a country cottage by the sea under the care of his housekeeper (Laura Linney) and the inquisitive attention of her young son (Milo Parker) who helps him explore an unsolved haunting case from his past by evoking fading memories of the facts surrounding it.

The case itself never becomes intriguing but the drama and tender interactions between a tired old man and an ambitious child are the heart of the film. The movie is slow, but very hypnotic. This is recommended entertainment for a lazy Sunday.

The Gift

*** out of ****

The Gift is Australian actor Joel Edgerton’s first venture into feature filmmaking despite years of experience in the business through performing and writing. Rebecca Hall and Jason Bateman play a married couple moving into a new expensive home in the California hills and begin to receive uncomfortably awkward visits from an odd man (Edgerton) from the husband’s past.

Like the similarly titled The Guest from last year, this movie feels like an affectionate throwback to bad thrillers from the early nineties. It’s absurd and even predictable, but there’s a degree of care put into the revival of old clichés, as if there’s a meaning being expressed.

Rebecca Hall’s performance as the wife is also a strong center for the film, even if she continues to be typecast as a modern Mia Farrow of a leading lady: A good woman, slowly learning the sordid secrets of the people who surround her. 

I saw the film’s big twist coming from a mile away, but when it arrived, I was relieved that it had a little more purpose than shock value. Regardless of this movie’s formulaic nature, it’s effectively intense and very creepy.

Mission: Impossible -Rogue Nation

*** out of ****

After Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams and Brad Bird; writer/director Christopher McQuarrie takes the helm in the fifth entry in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise, which has become an action vehicle for Tom Cruise comparable to the 007 series. Despite light connections, such as the character Luther (Ving Rhames) appearing in every movie, they’re all practically standalones with a different atmosphere and plot each time with very little character building.

That’s fine. The Bond movies do the same thing and we accept them for what they are. The Mission: Impossible movies take inspiration from the original television series with absurd technology, gadgets and improbable masks, which always seem to serve as a cheap “gotcha!” device. Ever since 1996, when the first entry in the re-imagined cinematic series began, we’ve been getting big budget action-packed cinematic treatments to these concepts and all of them – except for the second one – have been pretty damn cool.

So now that I’ve seen Rogue Nation, I’m happy to say that Cruise and his producing partners still know what they’re doing. Like Mad Max: Fury Road, this is a movie that reserves its CGI for where it is needed while amazingly real stunts (many of which Cruise does himself) are pulled off right in front of the camera.

This movie, once again, finds a reason for Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his team to be cutoff from the support of the American government as they search for the man behind an organization known as, “The Syndicate,” which seems to be causing disasters all over the world that look like accidents but seem to have specific results. I could deconstruct the plot for which I felt this movie wasted too much time, but I have to remember that McQuarrie was the man who wrote The Usual Suspects, so maybe I should skip a bit and say that the action set pieces still deliver. An assassination attempt during a performance of Turandot at the Vienna State Opera House is probably this movie’s most inventive segment.

This movie isn’t as fun as the last entry in the series, Ghost Protocol as its tone is a little less jovial and the score by Joe Kraemer isn’t as inspired as Michael Giacchino’s work in the last two. However, once again, Robert Elswit's celluloid cinematography continues the visually rich tradition of the series; the return of Simon Pegg as Benji, the timid tech specialist, still getting used to field work, is a welcome one; and the addition of Swedish actress Rebecca Furguson gives this series a female character who seems interesting for once –and looks tastefully more mature than a lot of the nineteen-year-olds they recruit as love interests in movies like these.

In short, it’s a little longer than it needs to be and seems uncertain as to how seriously it takes itself, but you can still expect a helluva show.