Draft Day

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: Ivan Reitman, Starring: Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner, Frank Langella and Dennis Leary

No one would ever confuse Ivan Reitman for Alain Resnais or Luis Bunuel; nuance and penetrating character studies aren't his forte. No one would also confuse Draft Day for Moneyball; Bennett Miller's terrific, wonky, thinking man's baseball film that had no love-for-the-game prerequisite. I can't imagine anyone enjoying Draft Day who isn't a football fan. I heard a young woman chattering away with her male companion during the film but judging from her comments, she wasn't much interested in the intricacies of NFL player trade and acquisition. So what would draw one to a movie heavy on draft and trade arcana? It couldn't be the relationship between Cleveland Browns General Manager Sonny Weaver Jr. (Kevin Costner) and a team executive named Ali (Jennifer Garner); though cute and pleasing to the eye, is all gravy and no mash potatoes. It also couldn't be Sonny's tempestuous relationship with his mother Barb (Ellen Burstyn), which flickers but doesn't burn.

Fortunately for me, I am a football fan and enjoyed the cutthroat dealings between NFL general managers as they fight for draft day pole positions, which a consummate professional like Kevin Costner makes fascinating with his natural acting and thermal charisma.

Writers Scott Rothman and Rajiv Joseph spoil Costner with dialogue crafted to demonstrate Sonny's cunning as he wheels and deals but they seem lost when it comes to the Sonny/Ali relationship; which has the added wrinkle of her pregnancy to complicate Sonny's life. Granted, the story takes place in one day but the relationship demands more than a hurried, on the fly, series of closet discussions a pesky administrative assistant keeps interrupting.

During draft day, Sonny is coerced into trading up to the number one position by the Brown's no-nonsense owner Anthony Molina (Frank Langella), who casually issues an ultimatum which might cost the GM his job. Sonny proposes a deal with the Seattle Seahawks GM, which is so weighted in the latter's favor that it strains (though doesn't shatter) plausibility. Sonny must give up the Browns' number one picks for the next three years for the top spot in the draft. It is implicit the number one pick is for a stud quarterback named Bo Callahan; a player most teams salivate over and like Sonny, are willing to sacrifice players and future picks to acquire.

The Brown's fans are livid when they learn Sonny has traded away their future on a player he discovers may have character issues, or as his mother puts it: "You sold a cow for magic beans?!" Molina on the other hand, is ecstatic over the trade and at the possibility the Browns may draft Callahan. Two other potential draftees and their agents woo Sonny; hoping to land lucrative, first-round contracts though his staff and the media are all screaming for Callahan.

We also learn Sonny's late father was a legendary Browns' coach and one he had to fire, causing him regret and much angst. The current Browns' coach; Penn (Dennis Leary; wonderfully cast) wavers in his support for Sonny; threatening to withhold his support when he discovers the three key draft picks might be traded away.

The drama mounts as the NFL Draft approaches and all of Sonny's problems appear conspiratorial: possible dismissal from his position, his pregnant girlfriend unhappy with a lack of commitment, fan rage, coach and staff mutiny, agents and prospective draftees breathing down his neck and his credibility as a GM hanging in the balance.

And in spite of Reitman's contrivances and Moneyball pretensions, Draft Day doesn't really work but it is fun to watch; again, Costner is the key. Every-time he speaks, we listen and believe he could be a General Manager and someone many would heed. When we aren't listening to Sonny, the other characters seem like Lego people; assembled, colorful and plastic. The director who gave us a comic classic like Ghostbusters may be out of his league, so to speak, in trying to show us a cross section of a professional sports general manager's day but the film will please football fans and it has a stamp of timeliness as the REAL NFL draft rapidly approaches. And if you aren't a football fan, well, at least you have your choice of eye-eclairs like Costner and Garner.

Joe

**Spoiler Alert**

David Gordon Green Dir. Starring: Nicolas Cage and Tye Sheridan.

Joe is so gritty one could easily mistake the images and setting for a documentary in its depiction of those existing marginally in the ever-expanding numbers of the destitute and poor.

David Gordon Green is not a director to shy away from that world; having explored it in films like George Washington and Prince Avalanche. Nicolas Cage summons his acting jinn for a refreshing change and he performs capably as an ex-con who leads a crew hired to poison trees for a private residence to make room for more "useful" trees. Joe's situation is only slightly better than those who work under him; he drives a shabby truck and spends his days either patronizing a local brothel, (which must be the most forlorn whorehouse I've ever seen in a movie), hanging his head in a local bar, or numbing his senses with senseless T.V.

His life becomes more complicated when a 15-year-old boy named Gary (Tye Sheridan) applies for a job on his crew. Joe discovers Gary's father Wade (Gary Poulter) is an abusive drunk who spends all and any available money on drink when he isn't beating Gary. Proving himself more than able for the job, Gary is hired but before long brings his father along, who manages to sow discord and get himself dismissed from the crew.

I have to say that Green found an unknown marvel in Gary Poulter; an Austin homeless man, who died tragically on the streets after filming concluded. His appearance and performance are so real he almost steals the film from Cage and Sheridan.

Joe also has to deal with a local bottom-dweller who shows up one day in his yard armed with a gun, with which he shoots Joe; wounding him. Joe recovers, becoming a sort of surrogate dad to Gary. Joe also has to resist the impulse to keep Wade from beating Gary to death. Eventually Joe runs afoul of the police, the town scumbag, and even Wade. It isn't long before Wade and scumbag join forces in a kill-Joe plot.

Green's film doesn't allow the characters relief or an escape from crushing poverty, thereby resisting sentimentality or a phony string of contrivances. He maintains a kind of a grim intensity throughout; tension building to a violent conclusion.

Cage and Sheridan are terrific but it is Poulter who is a revelation. He is frightening, sad and is full of contradictions. In one scene, Poulter follows a fellow drunkard to his hangout, hoping to share his wine but he instead strikes the man with a metal object; smashing his head; killing him. Afterward, he holds the man's head in his hands to kiss him in a strange act of empathy. The act is oddly beautiful; a gesture of love wed to an act of appalling violence. It is also strange that Poulter shares a tragic link to his character; a life imitating art coincidence.

A showdown between the principle characters comes to pass near the end of the film; a violent denouement that seems to be an inevitable end for denizens of an impoverished, violent environment. I liked the grit and grime of the film and Green's insistence we see this world; immersing us in a place most people would like to forget exists in America. Joe isn't a great film, but its raw look and feel, and its affecting performances, won't leave one's thoughts immediately after viewing.

The Last White Knight

Paul Saltzman, director of The Last White Knight, travelled from Canada in 1965 to Mississippi as a civil rights activist hoping to become involved in the voting drive for blacks, who had been intimidated, bullied and even murdered to deny them a basic, constitutional right. Already a hotbed of anti-black belligerence, the town of Greenwood was no different from any town in the south in its determination to keep blacks disenfranchised and politically marginalized.

Saltzman was accosted one day by a group of young, white Greenwood citizens; one of them being Delay de la Beckwith, son of the infamous Byron de la Beckwith; murderer of Medgar Evers. The confrontation prompted Delay to hit Saltzman in the face, causing him to flee in fear. Saltzman managed to outrun his assailants, living to accomplish his mission.

Many years later, well into our current century, Saltzman decided to reestablish contact with Delay in hopes of meeting with him for a sort of reconciliation. The two eventually come face to face for a series of meetings and for interviews, which form the narrative nucleus of The Last White Knight. Saltzman can be credited for initiating what makes a fascinating and also disquieting documentary.

The meeting also serves to personalize the history of the 1960s' civil rights movement in the south. Much of film covers familiar ground; the murders of Evers and the three civil rights workers Cheney, Goodman and Schwerner and the ever-present threat of violence but Saltzman also interviews black townspeople as well as members of the new KKK, who wouldn't agree to appear on film sans robes and hoods. Participants like Harry Belafonte, who served as an advisor to Martin Luther King and Mississippi residents like Morgan Freeman weigh in on past and present relations and what course they may take henceforth.

But it is the conversations between Delay de la Beckwith and Saltzman that make for exceptional viewing. Delay's onscreen, personable demeanor masks a deep-seated disdain for blacks, which hasn't wavered since his youth while Saltzman seeks a kind of rapprochement and maybe an admission that Delay's father was wrong to kill Evers. "The past is never dead. It's not even past," William Faulkner once said and it applies to Saltzman's film, which doesn't deceive us into believing race conflict is something quaint and of the 20th century. Though progress has been made, The Last White Knight shows us there's always ground still to be gained and a past to be appeased.

Finding Vivian Maier

Dir(s). John Maloof and Charlie Siskel

Director John Maloof was writing a history book when he felt he might need archival photographs to accompany the text. Attending an auction where sundry items were sold, Maloof discovers a cache of photographs and negatives he believes might aid him in his writing project. Unaware of what he might find, he looked over the negatives to discover extraordinary photography by a woman named Vivian Maier. Astounded by his discovery, he learns of a storage unit Maier kept, which Maloof acquires. Maloof also discovers Maier was deceased and was warned she photographer was a pack-rat. What he found inside may the first cultural discovery of this new century. Among odd collections of items like shoes and newspaper clippings were Maier's thousands of rolls of undeveloped photographs and film footage.

Excited by his find, Maloof went about contacting museums and professional photographers in an attempt to make her work known. It also inspired him to make Finding Vivian Maier, an absorbing documentary of an amazing talent whose work was very nearly consigned to oblivion if not for Maloof's efforts.

With some sleuthing, Maloof is also able to track down Maier's former employers and their children, who she served in a nanny capacity. We learn Maier spoke with a french accent, never married and was very eccentric. She covered her body in layers of clothing and always had a camera around her neck. Former children in her care describe outings where Vivian spent time photographing people and things and sometimes herself.

Her photographs capture reality; often the gritty honesty of people and places or objects. She was drawn to the downtrodden and the physically unglamorous and we learn from an employer she empathized with the poor and socially marginalized, who were also captured in her stunning photographs.

As for Vivian herself, what emerges also is a portrait of a very mysterious woman who not only had her peculiarities but dark episodes which sometimes degenerated into violence. A woman once in Maier's care recalls how Maier once held her down on the floor, her hands around the girl's neck; force-feeding her food. Another remembers her pathological fear of men and an incident where Maier felt herself threatened by a man's harmless gesture which led her to attack him, subjecting him to a concussion and hospitalization. Another bizarre idiosyncrasy was her french accent, which an acquaintance with an advanced degree in linguistics revealed as fake. The director turns to a genealogist in New York City to trace Maier's past only to discover she was born in New York. Though her mother was french, it becomes clear the linguist's claim bore the weight of legitimacy. Those who knew her say she was fiercely private; deflecting any and all questions about her past.

Whatever Maier truly was is up for speculation but the excellence of her work is beyond question. Though Maloof brings her work to the attention of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and some other museums of renown, his discovery is met with interest but a shocking lack of action. Undeterred, Maloof organizes his own exhibitions, which are received with enthusiasm and wonder by attendees.

Time will tell if Maier's work will join the canon of photographic masters but it almost seems a certainty, given one expert's high appraisal of her work. We the audience are rewarded by Maloof's efforts to tell Maier's extraordinary story. Hopefully her name will become household, but if not, it won't be for the lack of Maloof's passionate labor.

The Lunchbox

**Spoiler Alert**

Dir. Ritesh Batra. Starring: Irrfan Khan and Nimrat Kaur

I thought I had The Lunchbox pegged when I first watched the preview. It looked like a feel-good, light, Indian bauble but little more. I was surprised and pleased to find it defied my preconceptions.

Ritesh Batra's first feature-length film tells a story that relies heavily on three key performances and a deceptively simple story that weaves something both resonant and poetic.

As the film begins, we see the intricate process by which lunches are delivered to office workers in Mumbai. Bicycle, car, train--any and all manner of conveyance is employed to deliver the lunches, which are secured in small, distinctive, cloth bags.

With advice and sometimes ingredients provided from her aunt who lives above, Ila (Nimrat Kaur), spends her mornings preparing sumptuous lunches for her husband with such love and care, in hopes of rekindling her moribund marriage. Each day she is greeted at her door by the courier, who begins the arduous journey to the office.
Ila discovers one day that the lunches she has been preparing have been delivered to the wrong recipient.

Irrfan Khan-familiar to movie fans as the narrator of Life of Pi, plays a government number-cruncher named Saajan Fernandes, whose thirty-five years of service are about to end. He has also been assigned the task of training an irrepressibly friendly man named Shaikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), who he almost ignores on principle, in spite of the man's tenacious attempts to ingratiate himself to Saajan. A widower who lives alone, Saajan arrives home everyday to shoo away neighborhood kids who enjoy playing near his front gate.

Saajan receives Ila's lunches, finding the food's intoxicating aromas irresistable. Rather than return the lunches or correct the courier, he begins to enjoy them everyday; separating the silvery, metallic containers in which the food is stored from one another in what becomes a mid-day ritual. Ila soon learns her lunches are being consumed by someone other than her husband and begins leaving notes for the mysterious recipient in one of the containers. Saajan returns the notes, commenting on the food and eventually dispensing advice to Ila on her marital woes.

I thought I knew the direction the story would take: Saajan would strike up a friendship, then dabble in a flirtation and near romance before guiding Ila to a happy reconciliation with her husband. Only Saajan and Ila's epistolary friendship is evident from the previews, the rest of the film unfolds unpredictably.

Saajan's sad longing for his wife and his lonely evenings at home are paralleled by Ila's desperate attempts to reclaim her husband's affection, which fail miserably. As the deliveries continue, Saajan is soon sharing his food with Shaikh; who invites himself to the lunchtime table. Shaikh also falls under the spell of Ila's cooking and as a friendship develops between the two men, Shaikh invites Saajan to his home to sample some of what he believes to be his own exceptional cooking.

It is easy to see that food plays an integral role in the story. It serves as something to mend, to unite, to seduce and to express what words and physical gestures cannot. Food has taken on a symbolic role in films before. Babette's Feast is a notable example, but in Batra's film it takes on a more personal, urgent dimension. A scene where Ila and Saajan are to meet in a restaurant shows her waiting pensively for him to arrive. She drinks only water--eats nothing-and is stood up. We learn later that Saajan was actually in the restaurant but didn't make contact with her. It's interesting that the absence of food in a restaurant creates a wider gulf between them than the actual, vaster distance between Ila's kitchen and the lunchroom where Saajan enjoys her dishes.

The Lunchbox demonstrates Batra's directorial potential; his ability to coax exceptional performances from the cast and to tell a poignant story set in a few interiors with precision and economy. First feature films aren't normally so accomplished. It will be fun to see what he comes up with next.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

**Spoiler Alert**

Dirs. Anthony Russo, Joe Russo and Josh Wheedon. Starring Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson and Robert Redford.

Steve Rogers, also known as Captain America (Chris Evans), returns to the screen to take on the villainous Winter Soldier; a product of the post WWII Soviet government and a worthy, lethal adversary. Working with S.H.I.E.L.D., the secret government agency with an agenda to protect America at home and abroad, the Captain and the agency's leader Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) find they have suddenly become the targets of Hydra, a shadowy organization who have infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D. and are bent on world domination. Hydra agents, acting in the capacity of S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives, murder Fury and are hot on Captain America and The Black Widow's (Scarlett Johansson) heels. The Winter Soldier also joins the hunt and demonstrates his murderous potential with his super-strength and a solid, metallic appendage where his left arm used to be.

Rogers and The Black Widow enlist the help of a former american soldier, fresh from Iraq, named Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) who has access to a super, high-tech suit with wings which allows him to fly like a bird, or, in keeping more to his nickname: a falcon. The three elude the faux-S.H.I.E.L.D agents while also fending off the furious predations of the Winter Soldier in an attempt to thwart a Hydra attack on legions of individuals world-wide they feel are a threat to the organization. To accomplish this formidable task, they will employ military crafts with frightening, destructive force.

All the Marvel comics adaptations risk becoming what befell the Harry Potter series; where the individual films distinctness is erased by bland sameness. In recalling the Potter series, it's difficult to remember each film as anything but a regurgitation of what came before it. The same fate awaits the superhero movies Marvel churns out every year and now Captain America, which is still in its franchise infancy. The same computer-generated military crafts and mayhem that menace earth and mankind seem to be lifted from every other movie of its ilk and resemble much of what we see in previews for the forthcoming, cretinous dung Transformers.

I like elements of the movie: a new side-kick, Robert Redford as the duplicitous government official in the employ of Hydra, and the elevator fight scene where Rogers single-handedly gives S.H.I.E.L.D. agents a beat-down but overall, it all feels like I had eaten a bucket of chocolate bars and was feeling queasy from the after effects. It satisfies briefly but that feeling of contentment evaporates quickly en route to the exit.

What made the first Iron Man fun was Robert Downey Jr.'s flippant regard for authority and the humor in Tony Stark's approach to his superhero role. Unfortunately that film's charms are running low and every Marvel adaptation seems to be suffering from the same. In my estimation, Christopher Nolan's Batman series is the only complete and satisfying superhero franchise, with its freakishly frightening villains and its call for societal self-empowerment rather than law enforcement concentrated in the hands of one individual.

Though I'm a fan of Nolan's trilogy, my favorite superhero film of the 21st century (and man, are there gobs!) is Josh Trank's Chronicle. Eschewing the CGI-heavy, costumed-superhero-opera approach, Trank's film is understated, engaging and emotionally compelling. It accomplishes on a modest $12 million budget what Captain America: The Winter Soldier can't with its brobdingnagian $170 million expenditures. It's a film that violates Hollywood's spend more, think less ethos and deserves more than its cult status. I waited through Captain America's lengthy credits to see the teaser that always accompanies the Marvel adaptations and it's truly breathtaking how many personnel are involved in one superhero movie production. The credits alone could be franchise.

So again you might ask, why bother paying to see a whale like Captain America: Winter Soldier? Because sometimes I'm foolish enough to want a bucket of chocolate bars.

God's Not Dead

Dir. Harold Cronk. Starring: Shane Harper, Kevin Sorbo and Dean Cain

Who in their right mind would willingly pay and sit through something like God's Not Dead; a simple-minded, ham-fisted drama about a god-fearing college freshman who takes on his atheist professor in a debate concerning the existence of god? Well, someone looking for laughs, which the film provides though unintentionally. As I always say, there's no comedy like a bad drama.

God's Not Dead isn't a movie so much as an overly long infomercial about how Jesus and God are the answer and how the atheist-leaning or religiously indifferent masses need to wake up and embrace the divine--or some such nonsense. In fact, the film's production value is something akin to your average TV ad for Cialis.

Like the forthcoming film Heaven is for Real, God's Not Dead suffers from an imaginative-title deficiency but that is only one of its myriad problems. The movie doesn't have time to waste on nuance; it's on a proselytizing jag and its targets are atheism, science and reason. The film's message can be summed up simply as:

Atheists bad.

Christians good.

A newly arrived freshman on a college campus named Josh Wheaton (Shane Harper) looks to enroll in a philosophy course taught by a professor with a reputation for his aggressive, opinion-squelching, defense of atheism, (played by former TV Hercules, Kevin Sorbo). Josh has already made clear his love for God (if the cross dangling from his neck already hasn't) and is undaunted by the professor's reputation.

Josh finds his first day in class to be disconcerting, for his professor plainly states that anyone who doesn't share his incontrovertible view of atheism will fail the class. Though the class seems to be a general philosophy course, somehow the professor's virulent atheism seems to be the only topic of discussion. The Professor's manner is so bullying and intimidating it's astonishing he isn't arrested for assault and battery. One wonders at this point if the filmmakers have actually taken a college philosophy course because no real professor would be so ferociously opinionated. The professor actually insists each student write "God is Dead" on a sheet of paper to ensure he or she receives a passing grade in the course (I'm not making this up)!

Of course our hero, ever-bland and humorless and played that way by Harper, resists; standing firmly on his principles (who can blame him; even I would resist a professor so single-minded; and I'm an atheist!). What follows could only be called a waste of valuable class time and an implausible plot-development as the Professor, played with haughty disdain by Sorbo, challenges the freshman to a God vs Atheism debate.

Josh's girlfriend and friends discourage him from challenging the professor, warning him a bad grade in the course will keep him from law school. The imminent debate is the centerpiece of the film though other characters and subplots contribute to the hooey.

One character is a lefty blogger named Amy Ryan, whose callous, unfeeling boyfriend Mark (Dean Cain) is the movie's greedy, white-collar jerk who can't even be bothered to visit his dementia-afflicted mother. The girlfriend's villain credentials are established early: A shot of her car bumper stickers reveal several liberal causes. Both characters serve as more examples of how angry and hateful the Godless are and how they are in dire need of Jesus' love.

Other characters include a young, Muslim woman who resists her father's demand that she wear a head-scarf in public, which she promptly removes on campus and a Chinese student who shares Josh's class and eventually his love for Jesus. For a brief moment, I thought the movie might at least recognize Mohammed and Buddha as other Gods but no; the Muslim woman's secret and dangerous devotion to Christianity is revealed later, earning her a forceful dismissal from home by her father, who couldn't be more Mullah-like in his intolerance. Got it; only Jesus will do.

Eventually, all the atheists or liberals in the film suffer some sort of comeuppance or as one would easily guess, a conversion. After all her sinister, liberal machinations, Amy is diagnosed with cancer, which she chooses to reveal to Mark at an elegant restaurant. Mark wins the Unbelievable Bastard Award for breaking up with Amy following her cancer disclosure. This didn't make me gasp so much as chuckle: not only do you receive a possible death-sentence from your doctor but your boyfriend uses cancer as legitimate pretext to dump your ass. Yes, Amy, that's what you get for being Godless.

The debate proceeds as one would expect with the usual arguments for and against God's existence but of course in the end, you know who prevails. And it isn't enough that Josh wins the debate and convinces the class of his righteous position, he must also elicit a confession from the professor about how he came to hate God. And that isn't enough, for the professor, on his way to find his God-fearing girlfriend who he had earlier offended with his intolerant ways, is struck by a car. While lying in the street, he accepts God into his life as a Reverend waits beside him. And how does the Reverend comfort the dying professor? One might expect him to say "Stay calm until help arrives" or "Don't worry, help is on the way," but no, the Reverend actually says (again, I'm not making this up) "You'll actually get to see God before we do."(!) Thanks Reverend, good to know my chance of surviving is roughly that of a snow cone in hell. Isn't God great?

The movie ends with Amy embracing Jesus' love, the professor's convenient disposal, the Chinese and Muslim student's conversions to faith and everyone converging at a Christian rock concert by the band Newsboys for spiritual uplift and God's love, which radiate white-hot from the arena.

With the closing credits is a list of dozens of legal cases where religious groups filed successful lawsuits against universities all across the country to allow the Word to be spread. Following the list we see an exhortation to spread more of said Word.

The list of legal cases seemed like a desperate attempt to convince audiences the demand for God's word is still strong in institutions of higher learning. In all actuality, it confirms the opposite: there is a growing resistance to having Christianity as a presence on college campuses.

Is God dead? If he's not, God's Not Dead is happy to inform us he's definitely in a coma and is trying to be resuscitated.