Monthly Archives: June 2013

“The Internship”: Searching for comedy in the world of Google

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“The Internship” opens Friday at Point, Eastgate and Star Cinema. PG-13, 1:59, two stars out of four.

Once I realized that “The Internship” wasn’t going to be that good, it wasn’t that bad.

I realize that’s the faintest of praise for the new comedy reuniting “Wedding Crashers” Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, but it’s true. Once you accept that the movie isn’t going to be that funny, and isn’t going to be particularly sharp or thoughtful, it’s able to coast on the charms of its stars. For a while.

Vaughn and Wilson play Billy and Nick, two watch salesmen who have been made obsolete in the age of iPhones. (Watches are obsolete? Then why is Esquire magazine trying to sell me a $9,000 one every month?) After Googling for possible job opportunities, using keywords like “jobs for people with few skills” (good joke), Billy hits on it. Google. The fortysomething pals will enroll as interns at the company.

Entering a campus that looks unnervingly like the Madison Children’s Museum, slides and all, the pair find that their summer internship isn’t really an internship, but a semester-long competition with other students for jobs at Google. Of course, they land on a team of misfit nerds, and of course they are derided by the cool kids, led by Max Minghella. And, of course, Billy and Nick use some of that Generation X moxie to whip their team into shape.

“The Internship” unabashedly hits all the familiar beats of the campus comedy — the nerdiest kid turns into a wild man under Vaughn’s tutelage, Wilson’s charm defrosts a chilly professor — er, I mean, Google executive — played by Rose Byrne. Padded to nearly two hours, the movie lurches from one challenge to another, from coding to Quidditch, without much logic or wit. If this is really how Google selects its new employees, Bing should be eating its lunch.

But Wilson and Vaughn are certainly affable comedic actors, and Vaughn co-wrote the screenplay, playing to his strengths with long, digressive monologues delivered at rat-a-tat pacing. I also liked Josh Gad as a mysterious campus presence who gives Vaughn some sage advice. And there are moments where the film hints at the dire state of the economy, as when the younger members of the team fret about their job prospects, or when Billy and Nick’s boss (John Goodman) explains the gloomy outlook for their middle-aged careers thusly: “Where you’re going, you’ve already been.”

In the case of this overly familiar comedy, that goes double.

 

“What Maisie Knew”: A child learns how to survive her parents

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“What Maisie Knew” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. R, 1:43, three and a half stars out of four.

In the first scene of “What Maisie Knew,” we see six-year-old Maisie (Onata Aprile) playing tic-tac-toe with her nanny Margo (Joanna Vanderham). The game serves as a fitting metaphor for divorce: a confrontational game between two opponents that nobody ends up winning.

What’s different, and heartrending about how “Maisie”  looks at divorce is that it does so through her six-year-old eyes, sometimes uncomprehending, sometimes understanding far better than her parents realize. Why is Mommy crying? Who is that woman with Daddy? At times “What Maisie Knew” can be difficult to watch, especially if you’ve been through similar circumstances as either a child or parent. But it’s an intimate, well-acted and nuanced film that provides a fresh angle on an all-too-familiar struggle.

Maisie’s mom is Susanna (Julianne Moore) a fading rocker in the Courtney Love mode, who vacillates between neediness and indifference towards her young daughter. Her father is Beale (Steve Coogan), a wealthy art dealer who spends most of his life on the phone or abroad for business. They break up at the beginning of the film, and soon much of Maisie’s life is spent shuttling back and forth between one parent and the other, listening to one bad-mouth the other. There’s no doubt Susanna and Beale love Maisie, in their way, but there’s also no doubt that they are pretty lousy parents, self-involved and eager to win Maisie over to their side. The film is actually an adaptation of an old Henry James novel, but feels utterly contemporary.

Beale ends up moving in with the nanny Margo, and in retaliation Susanna marries a hunky young bartender, Lincoln (Alexander Skarsgard). As Beale and Susanna recede from the film — mercifully — it’s left to these new step-parents to take care of Maisie. And the twist you should see coming but don’t is that they turn out to be great parents for Maisie, much better than her biological ones. The relationship between the towering Skarsgard and little Aprile is particularly affecting — the two actors have a warm rapport you rarely see in child-adult relationships.

The acting is all terrific here — both Beale and Susanna could have easily been broad, villainous types, but Coogan and especially Moore make them seem more pathetic than villainous, so wrapped up in their own needs they can’t see the damage they’re doing. But this kind of film only pierces your heart if the child actress is good, and young Aprile is unbelievable, so natural and unforced, without a hint of cutesiness or pathos about her. The film looks at the world entirely through Maisie’s perspective, both in how it views the characters and in its luminous cinematography, the colors popping off the screen, the frame rate sometimes slowing down just slightly in moments of dreamlike rapture.

As Maisie stares uncomprehendingly up at her nattering parents, or warmly at Lincoln and Margo, you sense that she really does know quite a lot, and whatever happens, she’ll rise above it.

MMOCA’s Rooftop Cinema brings the avant-garde to the great outdoors

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Most of the outdoor movie offerings in Madison play it pretty safe, whether it’s family movies at the Duck Pond or cult hits on the Memorial Union Terrace, or, of course, summer blockbusters at the Highway 18 drive-in.

Which makes it that much more impressive that, for eight years running, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art has managed to fill seats in its Rooftop Garden (outside Fresco) with audiences eager to see 1960s experimental short films, trippy animated features, even a full-length music video that turned into a rooftop dance party.

Rooftop Cinema programmer Tom Yoshikami says he looks for films that are both accessible and avant-garde, if such a thing were possible. That means films that may be adventurous, but are also funny or strange or otherwise engaging to an audience. That often means short films, since a full-length experimental film can try even the most dedicated cineaste’s patience. And, of course, it helps that the setting is so wonderful, an unexpected angle to view the downtown skyline, the sounds of State Street wafting up from below.

Rooftop Cinema has a typically eclectic line-up planned for its eighth season,, running every Friday night in June at the museum, 227 State St. The show starts around sundown, and admission is free for MMOCA members, $7 for everyone else, and tickets are available at the door. Chairs are available, although many audience members bring blankets to sit on, and the Fresco bar offers cocktails to bring out onto the roof.

Here’s the June line-up:

Friday, June 7 — “The Hellstrom Chronicle” — A rare full-length feature film for Rooftop Cinema, “Hellstrom” is a strange 1970 film that blends B-movie sci-fi with documentary, as a (fictional) scientist warns about the viciousness of the insect population, and uses micro-photography of insects to prove his point.

Friday, June 14 — The Films of Miranda July — Before she made feature films like “You and Me and Everyone We Know” and “The Future,” July made several funny and unsettling short films. Fans of her work will immediately recognize her artistic stamp on these films.

Friday, June 21 — Animated shorts from the National Film Board of Canada — Canada has been a reliable source for entertaining animated shorts for Rooftop over the years, and our neighbors to the north finally get an evening devoted to their work, spanning from 1955 to 2013.

Friday, June 28 — Experiments in Space and Time — The list of short films for this closing collection is still being finalized, but the films will be a humorous look at altered perspectives, including “Turning Over,” a film about an odometer turning from 99,999 to 100,000 miles. (That was a bigger deal in the age of analog, kids.)

Instant Gratification: “Natural Selection” and four other good movies to watch on Netflix right now

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It’s the first week of the month, which means that Netflix Instant has added a whole bunch of new titles to its streaming service. It also means it took away a bunch, including “The Intouchables,” which just went up on Netflix and led this column a couple of weeks ago. C’mon, Netflix, check with me first!

Pick of the week: “Natural Selection”: My full review is here. I saw this indie comedy at the 2011 Milwaukee Film Festival, and though it never made it to Madison, is definitely worth catching up on. Rachael Harris of “The Daily Show” and the “Wimpy Kid” movies gets a rare chance to shine as the lead, a repressed Texas housewife who goes looking for the biological son of her critically-ill husband, who had been donating sperm on the side. What she finds is a skeevy, thieving man (Matt O’Leary) who she nonetheless tries to love like a son. It’s one of those comedies where nobody is above making fun of, but nobody is beyond empathy either.

Documentary of the week: “Chasing Ice”: My full review is here. Global warming can be beautiful. “Chasing Ice” features some truly majestic shots of glaciers cracking and falling into the ocean, or climbers descending into iridescent blue chasms caused by melting ice. It’s visually stunning, but chilling when we realize how irrevocable this beautiful destruction is.

Classic of the week: “Apocalypse Now Redux”: Netflix has both the original theatrical cut of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic 1979 Vietnam War film and this new director’s cut, which features additional scenes, including a controversial visit to a French plantation. It’s not definitive, but definitely worth seeing.

Comedy of the week: “Bedazzled”: As a comedy duo, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were in their prime in this swinging 1967 farce about a hapless man (Moore) who makes deals with the Devil (Cook) that somehow don’t turn out quite right. Very funny stuff.

Thriller of the week: “The Deep End”: Tilda Swinton is terrific in this well-plotted 2001 noir about an ordinary mother who tries to extricate her son out of a blackmail scheme.

You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an “E.T.” screening in Madison

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I’ve got nothing against Steven Spielberg’s beloved 1982 family classic “E.T. The Extraterrestrial.” I showed it to my own kids for the first time a few months ago and they loved it (although it may have helped that I shut it off just when E.T. started getting the sniffles.)

But it seems a little odd that Madison audiences have gotten so many chances to see the film in so many different ways over the past few weeks. First, Madison Parks kicked off its “Moonlight Movies” series of outdoor family movies in May with a screening of “E.T.” at Olbrich Beach.

Then, last Monday, the Lakeside Cinema series at the Memorial Union Terrace kicked off its series of outdoor films — all having to do with aliens or outer space — with, you guessed it, “E.T.” (“Spaceballs,” not quite as heartwarming, plays this Monday night.)

And now, when I was at Sundance Cinemas on Sunday to see “Frances Ha” for the second time, I saw that Sundance’s Classics Series is devoted the month of June to the works of Steven Spielberg. And screening on Wednesday, June 19 is, of course, “E.T.” My only question at this point is why the Rooftop Cinema series at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art couldn’t have worked in a “E.T.” screening in its June series — perhaps playing it backward to make it a little more avant-garde.

I guess it’s a testament to “E.T” as a bonafide family classic that generations of moviegoers will turn out for, both older audiences feeling a touch of nostalgia and young families exposing their kids to the saga of Elliot, Gertie and their new houseguest. Still, that’s a lot of Reese’s Pieces.

The Spielberg series, by the way, shapes up like this, hitting four of his biggest films. Not an “Always” in the bunch.

Wednesday, June 5 — “Jaws” (1:30 and 6:45 p.m.) — Less family-friendly than “E.T.,” to be sure, but the film that pretty much invented the concept of the “summer blockbuster” works like gangbusters.

Wednesday, June 12 — “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (showtimes TBA) — Seriously, how great will it be to see Indy’s first outing on the big screen again with an audience?

Wednesday, June 19 — “E.T. The Extraterrestrial” (showtimes TBA) — See above.

Wednesday, June 26 — “Schindler’s List” (showtimes TBA) — Not exactly my idea of big-tub-0f-popcorn summer moviegoing, but a film you must see at least once. I wouldn’t make a plan to go out for drinks afterward, though.