Arthur Newman

Opens Fri., April 26 at Meridian.
Not rated. 101 minutes.

The name Arthur Newman has been plucked out of thin air by an Orlando FedEx floor manager (and onetime amateur golf champ) named Wallace Avery. Nebbishy Wallace (Colin Firth) has suddenly glimpsed the opportunity to drop out of his life and start over, and “Arthur Newman” sounds like a suitably bland pseudonym.

Who knows where the name comes from? A subconscious desire to be that new man? A vague recall of countless Mad magazine covers? Whatever, it drives Wallace to becomes something—anything—other than what he is now.

And so we launch into Arthur Newman, a wish-fulfillment movie on the tantalizing topic of wiping the slate clean and starting over. For our hero, this means faking a suicide and hitting the road in a new convertible, leaving behind an estranged son (Lucas Hedges) and a girlfriend (Anne Heche—who, as usual, does a lot with very little). It comes as a huge disappointment that the film almost immediately introduces Arthur—we’ll call him that from now on—to a tiresome example of the manic pixie form, a girl called Mike (Emily Blunt), who shows up in a lounge chair by the pool at Arthur’s motel at midnight, tanked on cough syrup and self-loathing. His journey is thus derailed by a kook romance, as the two engage in a little harmless breaking and entering while role-playing their way through different characters.

You can feel the wind leave the movie’s sails when Mike shows up, as Arthur’s open road narrows to one neurotic (and, to be sure, erotic) focus. Nothing against the resourceful Blunt, who tries hard to get something authentic into screenwriter Becky Johnston’s conception of the role, but she has an impossible task. Firth revels in the tonelessness of his American accent, which reflects his character’s blankness. The whole exercise supplies a tidy metaphor for acting, as he tests out voices for Arthur, looking for the key to this new persona he’s tackling.

Director Dante Ariola has a track record in TV commercials, a history betrayed by his willingness to opt for the cutesy joke at every opportunity. The movie’s plot conjures up a faraway echo of the 1969 Francis Ford Coppola oddity The Rain People, and the comparison isn’t kind: Where Coppola went for arthouse eeriness, Ariola settles for self-satisfied vignettes. This undercuts whatever chance Firth and Blunt have at exploring the subject of personal emptiness and leads to a sentimental conclusion that resolves too much—while at the same time supposedly “leaving the door open.” The latter presumes our curiosity about what happens next, which seems unlikely in this case. ROBERT HORTON

Bert Stern: Original Mad Man

Opens Fri., April 26 at Harvard Exit.
Not rated. 89 minutes.

Marilyn Monroe died a half-century ago, and I want nothing more to do with her. Yet thanks to baby boomer necrophilia, people are still making money off her corpse—including photographer Bert Stern, whose famous final session with Monroe was published in Vogue just before her 1962 OD. We get to those images by midpoint in this mediocre doc, directed by Shannah Laumeister, once a Lolita-ish model for Stern in the ’80s. (And, implicitly, then his teenaged lover. Eww.)

The first, more interesting part of Laumeister’s film evokes an era when Stern and his buddy Stanley Kubrick were ambitious young photographers in postwar New York. Stern, now a very self-satisfied 84, was an art director for various magazines (Flair, Look, etc.) and ad campaigns during the ’50s and ’60s. “He invented vodka,” says ad maven Jerry Della Femina of Stern’s work for Smirnoff. “No one drank vodka in America.” And that’s not a bad legacy to have. As legendary copywriter George Lois recalls, “The photographers were [Irving] Penn, [Richard] Avedon, and Stern in my mind.” High praise, but who would say that today? (For a better survey of the Mad Men era, see Doug Pray’s 2009 doc Art & Copy.)

Stern freely confesses to being a lech who wanted to “make out with” (i.e., fuck) all his models. The inevitable montage of his portrait-sitters includes Twiggy, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Candice Bergen, and a more recent Lindsay Lohan—posing as Marilyn for New York magazine. (Exhausted talent, meet exhausted talent.) Laumeister, often in frame to question “her mentor” (in his creepy estimation), deserves credit for letting Stern’s ex-wives and adult children share some fairly damning recollections. Drugs brought Stern low by the early ’70s. Broke and divorced, he began pawing through his old Monroe negatives, and a profitable second career was born. His latest Taschen photo book, a mashup with Norman Mailer’s 1973 Marilyn bio, sells for $69 on Amazon. There’s still a market, as this needless documentary also proves. BRIAN MILLER

It’s a Disaster

Opens Fri., April 26 at SIFF Film Center, then moves to SIFF Cinema Uptown on Mon., April 29. Rated R. 88 minutes.

Julia Stiles is one of those talented young actresses who burst onto the scene in the late ’90s. At 18, she glowed in the Shakespearean teen comedy 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), but since then she’s been reduced to supporting roles (Silver Linings Playbook and a couple Bourne movies). So sharp, likable, and natural as an actress, she deserves better—like the role of Tracy in Todd Berger’s apocalyptic new comedy.

It all starts innocuously, as Tracy, a doctor, takes her new boyfriend Glen (a surprisingly subdued David Cross) to a regular couples’ brunch at a friend’s house. Unfortunately, the ensemble cast is the real disaster here. The outing is supposedly Tracy and Glen’s third date, but Stiles and Cross have little to no chemistry. Nor do their half-dozen brunch companions show much friendship. And you can’t blame them, because they’re all extremely annoying people—for example, Lexi’s a picky, pushy vegan/musician; she and her husband, with a lightning-bolt tattoo on his bicep, boast of spending the prior evening with “the white lady.” The table’s set for a classic, tired battle of the sexes: The three girls talk about vintage purses, while the guys are clamoring to go check out the game. “Glen, you better go, it’s gonna get all vaginal in here,” says Lexi. Ugh.

The afternoon’s interrupted by a power outage and then a neighbor (Berger) in a haz-mat suit, who informs them that all the major cities of the world have been bombed and that destruction is nigh. Was it aliens? Iranians? North Koreans? Berger doesn’t care. He just packs in comic details that are too cliched to be funny: A neighbor’s offended he wasn’t invited to the party; a toilet handle needs to be jiggled; jokes about the guy who still has a landline, about Adderall, etc. Tracy is the funniest character by far, mainly because she’s so disdainful of her friends. 

By the time Glen finally reveals a little depth, only 10 minutes are left in the film. His Hyde-to-Jekyll transformation is hilariously unexpected, and it leads to a tense, genuinely funny ending. But it’s too little, too late. For viewers, the question is less “Will they all die?” than “Would I really mind if they did?” Erin K.

Thompson

PMud

Opens Fri., April 26 at Meridian, 
Sundance Cinemas, and Thornton Place. Rated PG-13. 130 minutes.

It takes Matthew McConaughey a whole 95 minutes to remove his shirt in Mud, which is surely some kind of record. But to his credit, the Texas hunk has been enjoying a strong mid-career resurgence with Killer Joe, The Paperboy, Bernie, and Magic Mike. Ben Affleck may have the Oscar for Argo, but McConaughey’s redemption has been no less emphatic. It helps that he’s been working with good directors, like Jeff Nichols, whose Take Shelter was one of 2011’s best movies.

Mud is Nichols’ third film to be set in rural Arkansas, this time on a sleepy estuary of the Mississippi. McConaughey’s character, known only as Mud, is a ne’er-do-well native, a fugitive and teller of tall tales, hiding on a sandbar island. His improbable refuge—a boat lifted into the trees by a recent flood—is discovered by two young teens who naturally idolize this tattooed, charismatic outcast. Mud has a neat treehouse; Mud has a hot girlfriend (Reese Witherspoon) and a gun; Mud is every 14-year-old’s idea of cool, like some dude from a cigarette ad come to life.

Back home, reality is more complicated for Ellis (Tye Sheridan, one of Brad Pitt’s boys in The Tree of Life). Mud is his story, not Mud’s, as Ellis watches his parents’ marriage dissolve, has his first kiss, and begins to question the story Mud is feeding him. These scenes on shore feel undeniably real, grounded in the strip malls and fishing shacks of DeWitt, Arkansas (where Nichols has kin). There’s not much money, little beauty, a sense of diminished horizons. The locals shop at Piggly Wiggly because even Walmart is too expensive. The divide between magical isle and prosaic mainland is intentional, since Nichols clearly means for Ellis’ coming-of-age to coincide with his disillusionment with Mud. Still, the domestic scenes are a bit too familiar, and McConaughey’s romantic bandit can seem like he’s in a different movie, playing for an audience of two—Ellis and his pal Neckbone (Jacob Lofland).

Though a little too long and leisurely—shall we just say Southern?—for my taste, Mud is very well crafted and acted. (Look for Sam Shepard, Michael Shannon, and Joe Don Baker in significant supporting roles.) It’s a big step up from indie-dom for Nichols, but it’s also a step back to the classical. I mean this respectfully, but Mud feels like it could’ve been made in early-’60s Hollywood, written by Horton Foote. There are traces of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird—not because Nichols is borrowing, but because he’s plainly plowing that vein of Americana.

What finally wins you over, though, is the naturalistic, dirt-bikin’, boat-thievin’ freedom of Ellis and Neckbone, their rapport and worship of the grandstanding outlaw Mud, and the way he feeds on their adulation—just enough, possibly, to become a better man. Snaggle-toothed and wild-eyed, Mud is drunk on his own mythology of snakes, magical shirts, and boots with crosses in their heels to ward off the devil. He’s a guy in love with his own image, but aware it’s only an act; and I can’t help but wonder if McConaughey’s new depth as an actor—at age 43—carries some of that same self-assessment. It’s not just Ellis who’s growing up here. BRIAN MILLER

Night Across the Street

Runs Fri., April 26–Thurs., May 2 at Northwest Film Forum. Not rated.
110 Minutes.

Billed as the last completed film by Raul Ruiz (1941–2011), the prolific Chilean expat who worked most of his career in France, Night Across the Street also bears the stamp of Chilean writer Hernan del Solar, who’s even less known in the U.S. In this adaptation of Solar’s stories, Celso (Sergio Hernandez) is nearing retirement, an office clerk with no wife or kids. His mind drifts back to childhood scenes in which he’s sometimes a youthful participant, sometimes a grown observer, sometimes both. In the present—though temporal lines are extremely fluid—he lives in an old boardinghouse among various colorful characters. It’s a place of memories and fantasy figures; its rooms are like the chambers of Celso’s own mind, with doors leading to doors of remembrance.

Old Celso’s best friend is imaginary: the Chilean writer Jean Giono, a real figure here incorporated into the fiction. He and Celso discuss “marbles of time”—how we don’t experience time as a continuous flow, which is very much Ruiz’s working method here. Old Celso is also called “an immobile voyager,” a man sailing through time from his armchair. All his alarm clocks and ships-in-bottles are tokens of time suspended (or possibly repeating itself). In scenes from his ’50s youth, Beethoven shows up, striding across the soccer field. Young Celso (Santiago Figueroa) and a pal even take the composer to the movies, where the cowboys and Indians confound poor Beethoven. (“How tall the people are!”) There are also periodic consultations with Long John Silver, his pirate vessel seen crashing across the celluloid waves of old black-and-white Hollywood. (Ruiz not-so-coincidentally directed a version of Treasure Island in 1985.)

The tone is by turns whimsical and absurd, comic and morbid, slow and silly. Scenes suddenly shift in visual and metaphysical perspective. You can see the influence of Borges and Bunuel; there’s a further Pirandello aspect to the boardinghouse characters, so self-aware of their place in this fictional world. Old Celso claims to be waiting for an assassin, but even a bloody shootout doesn’t put an end to Night. The victims, now ghosts, hold a cheerful seance—but who are they trying to contact? Usually it’s the living who seek the dead. But for Ruiz, those realms are parallel or even circular, rolling around like marbles. BRIAN MILLER

Pain & Gain

Opens Fri., April 26 at Meridian and
other theaters. Rated R. 120 minutes.

Michael Bay has spent the past few years living in the very profitable world of Transformers, but his new film is based on an actual series of crimes in mid-’90s Miami. Daniel (an astringent Mark Wahlberg) is a personal trainer barely making ends meet, worried about “another 40 years of wearing sweatpants to work.”  To avoid that fate, he corrals two of his beefiest Sun Gym coworkers: Adrian (Anthony Mackie, of 8 Mile and The Hurt Locker), whose muscular goal is to have to walk sideways through doorways; and Paul (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), a former cokehead and current born-again Christian fresh out of prison. The trio kidnaps one of Daniel’s clients, a smug, self-satisfied millionaire named Kershaw (Monk’s Tony Shalhoub), and forces him to sign over his assets—bank account, house, cars, everything.

At first, Daniel’s frustration with his socioeconomic plight earns our sympathy, even taking into account his past history of fraud. Wahlberg is Wahlberg, Mackie is handsome and winning, and Johnson’s dopey mug has its charms. But all three performances are lost 
in this gaudy mess of a film. It’s packed 
with Bay’s usual machismo: strippers, 
Lamborghinis, Tasers, steroids, and ladies with fake boobs.

And the violence is shockingly nonchalant. Barbells make a merry clinking sound as they smash into a man’s Adam’s apple. When a toe gets shot off, of course there’s a slo-mo close-up; ditto when someone’s skull is run over with a van. (The ease with which the gang purchases weaponry without a background check is disturbing on another, broader level.) Our heroes show no compunction about beating Kershaw, pouring alcohol down his throat, and burning his hands. If, earlier, we watch Kershaw verbally abusing his employees, 
Bay seems to see that as equivalent to his subsequent torture.

Even if gratuitous violence is OK with you, there’s plenty else to offend: jokes about rape, Indians being confused with Native Americans, and Paul punching a man for coming on to him. Having been stuck in PG-13 land for the last decade, Bay too eagerly grabs at the R, embracing every stereotype and blood -platter. “No homos in this bunch, right?” Daniel asks some kids at the gym. No, and nor will there be any in the audience for Pain & Gain. Nor any women. Nor anyone with a brain. Just because Bay’s characters are a bunch of clueless meatheads doesn’t have to mean his viewers are, too. But that’s probably the way it’ll work out. Erin K. Thompson


Sun Don’t Shine

Runs Fri., April 26–Thurs., May 2 at 
Grand Illusion. Not rated. 80 minutes.

A convincing fistfight is always a challenge to execute in the movies, so Sun Don’t Shine begins on a promising note: two people, a young man and woman, ham-handedly scrapping in the midday Florida sun. They look clumsy, stupid in their movements, and the scuffle has an authentically awkward feel.

Plus, it lets us know we’re in the middle of something. The two are Crystal (Kate Lyn Sheil) and Leo (Kentucker Audley), who are driving across the Sunshine State for reasons that will dribble out only gradually. Despite the momentary fracas, they are together, in an awful sort of l’amour fou kind of way, and the gun in the glove compartment suggests that they carry a dark secret on this journey.

Leo is tight-lipped and unto himself, which might explain why Crystal goes the other direction: This tiny-eyed, baby-faced dynamo is a true loose cannon. It’s hard to choose which would be the worse companion for a road trip.

Sun Don’t Shine is written and directed by Amy Seimetz, whose performances in local director Megan Griffiths’ The Off Hours and Shane Carruth’s current puzzler Upstream Color have marked her as one of her generation’s more fiercely watchable actresses. She doesn’t appear in Sun Don’t Shine, but displays enough directing touch to make you curious to see more.

The film’s most notable success comes in conjuring the humid texture of a particular place, from the Florida backroads to the tourist kitsch of the mermaid show at Weeki Wachee Springs. Gorgeously shot on 16 mm film—with cameras loaned by Northwest Film Forum—and baked in the subtropical sun, the stifling mood could explain the unhappy twosome’s obscure behavior.

Sheil and Audley come from the lo-fi realm of indie film (some folks call it mumblecore), and there’s a workshopped aspect to Sun Don’t Shine that will either provide excitement or exasperation, depending on your tolerance for that vibe. I confess that Seimetz appears more fascinated by Sheil’s otherworldly spaciness than I am, but maybe that’s a matter of taste.

The picture feels closer in spirit to the American cinema of the ’70s than to mumblecore, and it does steer in the direction of the more out-there efforts of Robert Altman and Monte Hellman during that era. (Occasionally I wish a young filmmaker would revisit the American cinema of the ’30s, but that doesn’t seem likely.) Here, you have to be willing to put up with the maddening match of Leo and Crystal, but the movie around them is a persuasive fever-dream. ROBERT HORTON

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